No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Uwe wanted to know where they were going as he walked, holding Anna’s hand. Her father, carrying Gretchen, still asleep, said they were going to visit a friend from his days at the university who now taught at the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. They walked nearly a mile along a deserted road, and then in the distance there was an abandoned stone house, which she surmised decades later had been part of her father’s escape plan. They went into the house, and their father announced that they would stop there for a while, until dark, then they would go on. They ate sitting on some hay bales, their mother spreading a tablecloth over one of the bales so that they were reminded of being home. Her grandparents spoke Yiddish, their faces showing worry. Her grandmother Rachel was still shaking a little bit and taking only tiny bites of food. Her mother spoke soothingly to them and her father listened attentively.

  When the sun began setting her father looked out the window of the stone house. He stepped away rapidly and from his medical bag removed a small pair of binoculars and again looked out the window. He returned to the family and announced, in German, that no matter what happened, no one was to cry or be afraid, that there could be a dangerous situation coming and everyone must be very brave. And then their father asked the children to go quickly out the back door of the stone house and into the grove of birches. He handed Anna the picnic basket and gave Barbara his medical bag. And then he and their mother and their grandparents kissed everyone hastily. “Go now,” he said to them. “Go. No time to waste. Schnell, bitte. Your mother and I will follow soon and bring your grandparents.”

  They went quickly out the back door, through the fence gate and across a field of tall grass and then silently into the woods. When they were in the grove, protected by the shadows of the trees and the failing light, Barbara turned and saw the car with the German officers wearing swastika armbands getting out of the black vehicle and heading for the house. They were followed by motorcycle soldiers with machine guns.

  Once again Dr. Gelfand went to the window and stood there, the afternoon light making her pale skin appear paper-thin. When she turned she was smiling sadly and said that she never saw her parents or grandparents again. She and the rest of the children had spent the night in the woods. Toward early morning, led by Anna, they had crossed the border into Holland and entered a small town. Anna took them to the address that her father had given her, and they remained there for nearly a week. Then, they eventually made their way on foot, by car, and in canal boat to the house of their father’s colleague, who was a professor in Utrecht. During the three months that they lived in the professor’s house, they wondered what had happened to their parents. Anna, Karin, and Barbara lied to Gretchen and Uwe, telling them that their parents would be coming soon. One afternoon the professor said that things had grown worse and it was best for them to cross the channel to England. They were given warm clothing and put on a train and then a boat to England.

  “I never found out what happened to my parents,” Dr. Gelfand said, adding that she had tried everything possible, and that it wouldn’t be quite so painful if she had at least been able to finally learn that they had been sent to Dachau or another of the death camps. Instead, they had been swallowed up by time and the brutality of war. On one of her trips to Germany she learned that her grandparents, Joshua and Rachel Altschuler, had been exterminated by the Nazis at Buchenwald along with countless others. But in more than forty years she never learned her parents’ fate.

  The story affected Elsa powerfully and she wondered if Puerto Ricans were being culturally annihilated as Hitler had attempted to do with the Jews. It wasn’t the same as disappearing, but one could as well become a walking wraith and cease to function.

  Toward the end of her junior year of college, when Vidamía was about to enter first grade, Elsa began to feel rudimentary feelings of motherhood and intimations of identification with her mother, who still lived down on the Lower East Side in the same small apartment, now made larger because she was alone. Elsa knew that those first six years had had their effect on Vidamía, and although she called Elsa “mommy” and Ursula Santiago güela or güelita, the slang term for abuela, grandmother in Spanish, the real mother in her life was obviously Ursula. Vidamía had quickly learned that there were certain filial responsibilities that she must respect and adhere to and she did so with remarkable aplomb.

  Given Vidamía’s disposition, it was fairly easy for her to overlook her mother’s faults. What she suspected, but didn’t want to confront, was Elsa’s profound antipathy toward her. Vidamía’s antidote to the pain of the rejection was to become the perfect child who lived in careful admiration of her mother, fulfilling every intellectual and social ambition her mother had for her; instinctively knowing that if she couldn’t be loved by her mother she could at least gain her respect; joyfully and willingly taking test after test to determine her intelligence; serving as her mother’s reassurance that she wasn’t a hindrance; rising at six o’clock each weekday morning to make herself ready to go with her mother all the way down to Hunter College, Elsa having discovered in her senior year at the college that there was a Hunter College Elementary School, which she looked into and, through Mrs. Kantrowitz and Dr. Gelfand’s influence, got Vidamía tested and admitted to.

  This was also the year she met Barry and within six months they were married and had moved to a beautiful apartment in Riverdale. The further Elsa went with her education, however, the more time and money she spent attempting to fathom what was wrong with her life. No matter how much she tried, she remained trapped in a vague zone of her being that made her feel as if she were walking around with her eyes closed and her hands outstretched to reassure herself that there were no impediments in her way. She found herself wanting to be in command of every situation, and of everyone’s life, including her daughter’s. She soon realized that beneath all her emotions there was still a self-loathing that, although submerged, surfaced with disturbing regularity. The worst part was the feeling that she didn’t belong to that wondrous world of intellect and exploration of the mind which so fascinated her. Upon receiving her Ph.D., she immediately sought work and was able to find employment at a hospital on Long Island.

  After dropping Vidamía off at Hunter College Elementary School, she traveled each morning an hour to be at work at ten a.m. and she had to be back at five to pick Vidamía up. No matter how much psychoanalysis she endured, she couldn’t get rid of the images of those summer days when she and the other girls got on the subway and felt absolutely free, and she could still hear all the songs. She kept hearing one of them over and over like a leitmotif—Ay, camina y ven para que gozes conmigo, translating it as “Hey, let’s go so you can enjoy yourself with me.” But she could never enjoy herself ever again, because she had given her freedom away. The irony of the other song, the Alegre All Stars’ “Estoy Buscando a Kako,” in which the singer is looking for someone, continued to haunt her and produced such anger that one day, alone in her beautiful apartment while Vidamía was at a friend’s house, she began pounding her head until a torrent of tears poured out of her, the sobs in her chest so uncontrollable that she felt as if at any moment she would pass out from the emotion. She eventually fell asleep on the living-room floor and didn’t wake up until Barry came in.

  One afternoon during the year she was writing her dissertation, Elsa had gone into the Times Square subway station and found the record shop where there is every kind of album and tape of Latin music and purchased the Alegre All Stars’ album, then returned to the Riverdale apartment and played it. A smile returned to her face as she thought of those days. And then, suddenly, in the middle of listening to the record, she realized that she would never find herself again, that her memories and who she was had been left in that lovely, quiet room, on that psychoanalytic couch on Park Avenue. But she was unable to hate Dr. Gelfand, because no one had ever shown such kindness and concern for her, which she was, of course, unworthy of, deserving nothing but hatred because no matter how many times
she returned to Dr. Gelfand she could never be whole. She continued keeping her weekly appointments until one day she went to Dr. Gelfand’s office and was told that the doctor had passed away. She spent the next eight months in a dangerous depression, suicidal feelings swirling around almost every subject that came into her mind. She was a horrible mother, daughter, sister, wife, scholar, therapist, lover, American, Puerto Rican—but, most of all, woman. And now her darling little mistake of a daughter, whom she had been charged with loving and who kept her constantly confused with feelings of inadequacy, had gone and unearthed the memories of Billy Farrell and his lost life.

  Damn her and damn him.

  10. Dear Diary

  The big, red-faced man said his name was Michael Sanderson and greeted Vidamía with a nod—apprehensive and suspicious, she imagined, of the wealth that had attached itself to her person without her having any control of it. She could always tell when money made people uncomfortable. He went around to the other side of the car, and Vidamía sensed that he felt foolish opening the door for her. She was dressed in a flowered dress and was wearing stockings and cordovan loafers and suddenly she felt silly that so much money had been spent on the clothes she wore, her mother always insisting on the most expensive items. But this was a special occasion, so it was all right. She carried a small pocketbook and her hair had a small ribbon in it. There was a bit of gloss on her lips. When she was inside, seated demurely, having put her seat belt on without being asked, he got into the car, breathed a sigh, started the engine, and drove through the wealthy neighborhood—the acreages in the double figures and beautifully landscaped—computing how much each house must cost. Vidamía thanked him for coming to pick her up, calling him Mr. Sanderson.

  “You’re my father’s uncle, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Grandma Maud told me,” Vidamía said. “She described you pretty accurately. I guess that makes you my granduncle. Do you have children?”

  “Yes, I do. Two boys and two girls.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Michael Jr., Peter, Maureen, and Samantha.”

  “And how old are they?”

  “Michael’s twenty-three, Peter’s nineteen, Maureen’s sixteen, and Sam’s about your age.”

  “Sam? I like that. I’m twelve.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said and laughed for the first time at Vidamía’s seriousness.

  “Sam’s fourteen. I thought you were older.”

  “Thank you very much,” she said, feeling foolish. “I guess I should wait to grow up, but being a child can be very limiting,” she added, knowing she probably sounded a bit affected.

  “Enjoy it, kid,” Michael Sanderson said. “It doesn’t last that long. After a while time just disappears on you. One day all you can do is ask yourself where your life went. Believe me.”

  “You’re probably right. I guess we’re all cousins. Your kids and me.”

  “Yeah, I guess you are,” Michael Sanderson said. “Let’s see,” he mused as he turned onto the highway for the trip to Maud’s. “Sure. My kids are Billy’s first cousins and Billy’s kids are their second cousins. You’re Billy’s kid, so you’re my kids’ second cousin. Sam’s going to be very happy to hear that.”

  Vidamía then asked Michael Sanderson if there were any other brothers and sisters besides her grandma and him. Michael Sanderson said there had been seven of them, but Brendan had died when he was just a baby. So there was her grandmother Maud, the oldest, then Mary Katherine, Douglas, Olivia, Frazier, and himself. She asked him about the entire family, how many children each of his brothers and sisters had, so that by the time they reached Maud Farrell’s apartment, Vidamía had gained nearly one hundred relatives from her connection to her father. The idea that they included people all over the United States and Canada, and even a cousin who was a sheep rancher in New Zealand, made her feel enormous pride.

  When Vidamía walked into Maud’s apartment she was stunned that the large blond-headed man standing there was her father. For a moment she just stared at him, looking from his face to his right hand, which was at his side, wanting to see the places where the missing fingers had been as Grandma Maud had said, wanting to see them and touch them to see if she would feel disgusted, and him just saying, barely audibly, “Hi, how are you? My name’s Bill.”

  And then he came forward and opened his arms awkwardly so that she felt as if the two of them were magnetized figures who couldn’t help but move toward each other, and she rushed, crying, into his arms and buried her face in his long hair and he kissed her face and then wiped the tears with the back of his right hand, not at all fearful that he would scare her since Maud had explained that it would be worse if he tried hiding it from her and Bill trusted his mother, who had never hurt him in any way. Maud had been equally confident with Vidamía and had told her that her father had been very brave and that the hand was like any other hand, except that it’s missing those two fingers and that she ought to look into his eyes and into his heart and if she saw his love for her there, she shouldn’t worry about the rest. When he began to withdraw the hand, Vidamía took it tenderly and held it in both of her hands. She then brought it to her face, kissed it, and said, “I love you, Daddy,” and Billy Farrell said, “God bless you, I love you, too.”

  That day they sat in the living room for a good half hour, Maud the only person saying anything, telling Vidamía stories about Billy—things like the fact that when he was a boy his room had been filled with model airplanes and ships, the planes suspended from the ceiling by thread that he took from her sewing kit—fighter planes, American P-51s, German Messerschmitts, Japanese Zeros, British Spitfires, B-29 bombers—achieving this by moving his dresser, climbing on it, gluing the thread to the ceiling, and then rigging the airplanes at different heights so that at a distance they appeared to be flying. She didn’t tell Vidamía how on the day Billy found out that his father had been killed his face became gray and his eyes opened wide at the shock. He’d gone to his room and locked the door and all Maud could hear was the sound of a baseball bat hitting the fragile plastic and balsa of his airplanes until, an hour later, he came out and ran to her, his face ravaged by the pain of his dual loss, a small cut on his neck where a sharp piece of plastic had pierced the skin.

  Holding back her own pain in order to comfort him, Maud had held him close to her, not saying anything but absorbing his pain—so much that she feared that at any moment she would break down. She had taken him into the bathroom and washed his face, running the cold hand towel over his reddened cheeks and moistening his neck, which was burning hot. After a while she gave him a glass of orange soda and a sandwich and went into his room. Everything was smashed, shattered, destroyed. The nearly twenty-five airplanes hung in pieces from the threads, a half wing here, a tail there, a cockpit a bit above the rest. And on the bookcase and desk where he had carefully placed his ships—cruisers, battleships, even the PT-109 his father had helped him build, because it was President Kennedy’s boat—everything was shattered. And then she saw the photograph of Mickey Mantle, his hero, also smashed. The Mick swinging the bat, keeping his eye on the ball and his head down, just like Billy’s dad had taught him. And now he was gone. The force of the blow had driven Mantle’s uniform, below the Yankee logo, into the wallpaper, the picture left hanging not by its wire and hook but by the adhesion of the cardboard and photograph to the wall.

  In time she’d had someone come in to repair and repaper the walls. Billy never built airplanes again and never wanted to play the bagpipes. He withdrew into himself, spending most of his time at his grandparents’ in Yonkers. Maud had to go out and support herself and Billy because Kevin’s death benefits were not enough, working first as a waitress, which kept her busy and in front of people. Because when she was alone all she did was cry and imagine Kevin’s last minutes, his splitsecond decision to go into that bar without first learning what was going on inside. Would she have done the same thing in his plac
e? She couldn’t imagine. Her only release from the torture of the tragedy was to go to confession and repeat monotonously, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” and then confess to the searing hatred she felt for the men who had killed her husband, extending the hatred to their relatives, and their friends, and everyone who came from that wretched island, the spic bastards.

  “They’re worse than niggers,” Dotty Gagliano’s husband had said.

  He had a beer distributorship in the Bronx and every other word with him was kike this and Polack that, sparing no one his hatred except for a small group of people who came from a particular section of Naples; everyone else was scum, even the Sicilians and the Calabrese. Dotty would just stand around and frown and shake her head. Maud supposed that Dotty’s hatred was fueled by being around Lou Gagliano, but in those years all she herself could think about was that those people who had come here to collect welfare had killed Kevin.

  Now here she was chatting with this lovely, innocent child, her granddaughter, for whom she felt the greatest love and a desire to protect her from a world that, in her experience, could be harsh and without conscience. After a while, Maud Farrell announced that it was time for dinner and the four of them sat down to roast beef, mashed potatoes with gravy, vegetables, salad, and a big apple pie with ice cream. At one point during the meal Maud observed Billy eating heartily, and she remembered then that Billy was always a good eater, from the time he was a little baby, always taking everything she gave him with great enthusiasm and with a gratitude that reminded her of a small puppy. He was a fierce eater, cutting his meat into large chunks and shoveling it into his mouth. She observed the contrast between his style and that of Vidamía, whose manners were very polished and her movements at table dainty. She was pleased, however, that the girl ate with an equally healthy appetite, her granddaughter looking up at one point and nodding approvingly. Maud laughed and said there was still pie and ice cream. Vidamía smiled. When Maud had served the pie and scooped ice cream on it, Vidamía finally got up enough courage to ask about her father’s other children.