by Edgardo Vega
At night he remained awake for hours, lying still in the hope that he could rest, but not fall asleep, so that he wouldn’t have to wake up to the nightmare in which he walked in a procession dressed as an altar boy with the Sacred Heart of Jesus on a silver tray, the bloody mass crying out in Spanish, and he dutifully delivering it to the president of the United States, who was faceless, because that is what he dreamt and he couldn’t switch channels.
There were also occasions when he emerged from the thick mist of misfortune that had enveloped his mind and read, played the guitar, or went walking through the neighborhood, stopping at the post office and looking at the wanted posters, wondering if any of those guys had served in Nam, as if all men were divided into two groups: those who had experienced the madness of that war and those who were too young or too old or had found some way to avoid being there. He wandered through the streets, so that everyone knew what had taken place in his life as clearly as if he were wearing not jeans and a fatigue jacket but a death shroud. He walked the streets lost in thought, sometimes crossing into Mount Vernon and stopping off to see his mother at O’Hanlon’s in the afternoon, when only the old people sat there quietly with their drinks, waiting to be summoned to their death or the funeral of a friend or relative.
Wearing his sorrow without style, Billy climbed up on a stool and smiled sadly at his mother. She brought him a mug of draft beer and he remained there, sitting, sipping the cold brew in the semi-darkness and recalling places where he had played jazz. In the quiet shadows of his mind he could see everything: the musicians playing their instruments, the movement of their fingers and the expressions on their faces, the music coming in pleasant waves, but now all of it was foreign, as if jazz had never existed in his life. He enjoyed the memory of the tunes but was unable to express their complexity now, so that there might as well not have been any sound to them. This bothered him because in his memory he could even smell the cigarette smoke and hear clearly the tinkling of glasses and the buzzing of the audience as they spoke. But no matter how much he concentrated, the music wasn’t there and a simple twelve-bar blues played upon a piano remained as much a mystery as the diagram of a rocket engine.
The subway train rolled on through the Bronx neighborhoods, letting passengers out and taking on more, all of them with stories to tell and memories plaguing them. He couldn’t understand how suddenly he could recall tunes. He thought of the song “Summertime,” and as in a dream he closed his eyes and saw himself playing again, his ten fingers still there as he bent over the piano, eyes closed, humming softly, singing the lyrics inside his head: “Your daddy’s rich, and your ma is good looking, so hush little baby, don’t you cry.” The clickety-clack of the wheels on the tracks and the music in his head relaxed him. He slipped into a halfdream state and then fell asleep dreaming he was a Vietnamese boy with long blond hair leading a water buffalo, and Vidamía, as she had looked today, was riding the animal. She was holding a photo album and singing a song he didn’t recognize.
“What were you singing?” he asked Vidamía.
“I wasn’t singing,” she said, smiling at him.
“Yes, I heard you.”
“It was in your head.”
“How can that be? How can you have been singing in my head?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you remembered something. Maybe I was singing in your memory.”
“But what was the song?”
“Oh, you know the song.”
“I do?”
“Yes. It’s the Eenie meenie pepsodeenie song.”
“Well, sing it again.”
“I’ll whisper it to you,” Vidamía had said.
She came close to him. He moved his hair away from his ear and she whispered the words—Eenie meenie pepsodeenie, Ah Bah boobalini—but he didn’t recognize them, so he figured it was a poem. When she was finished, she asked him if he liked it. He nodded and they smiled and then went inside a marble house and had a lunch of tropical fruits with K-rations and a little dog meat. There was no one there but they were happy and he wondered why he was a boy and Vidamía such a big girl.
Billy woke up as the train pulled into Fourteenth Street, the wheels screeching as they turned into the station. He got out and walked upstairs to the street. The bright lights startled him and he walked east until he got to First Avenue. He then turned south and continued to St. Mark’s Place and again walked east. He passed a photo shop and stopped to look at the albums and suddenly everything came together. There were all sorts of memories. Distant memories of happy times and sad times when he was a child. Memories of the war, and recent memories, such as being with Vidamía for the first time. The music was there, stuck between the memories of being a boy and the present memories. He narrowed his eyes and looked at the album inside the store window and sighing deeply, turned and continued walking.
He let the memories of his life flow freely now, hesitant at times but trusting himself a little more, fearful that the battlefield images might attack him, but steeling himself to them. He crossed the street at Avenue A, waved to a couple of people he knew, went into Tompkins Square Park, found a bench, and sat down.
Once, a few months after being dismissed from Elsa’s life, Billy snuck back down to the Lower East Side and wandered through the streets, mingling with the ghosts of millions of immigrants who had traded in their identities, their languages, some even their souls in order to be Americans. Up and down Suffolk and Norfolk, Forsyth and Essex, Kenmare and Eldridge, Rivington and Stanton, Clinton and Pitt, the names thoroughly British, as if the area were an English decompression chamber one must enter to be cured of ethnic ills before emerging as a full-fledged citizen of the United States. He wandered through the maze of sad streets and sorrowed memories down to Grand Street, and in the park on the edge of Chinatown, by chance, he saw Elsa under the full sail of her pregnancy, big as a house, beautiful and happy, talking to some girls with baby strollers. His heart broke some more, but he knew it was no use, so he just kept walking, knowing he might as well have remained with Joey back in Nam. He didn’t blame anyone but wished the hell he could turn back time.
Miles Davis brought the horn to his mouth and then back down and through the previous night’s aroma of cigarettes and whiskey left in the club where they were rehearsing, said, “What you lookin’ at! And don’t ‘I’m a pianist, Mr. Davis,’ me!”—Miles cutting him off in mid-sentence when he began to explain, not needing to because Pop Butterworth must have already told Miles about him. Not even in Nam would he feel the kind of fear he felt in front of the slight, shiny black man whose eyes threatened to burn through him, the rage in them so intense that he felt literally like running from there.
“He’s a pianist, Wayne,” Miles said turning to the serious man holding the tenor saxophone to him like it was a child that needed comforting. The serious man, his lips pursed and his head held high, nodded. “Ain’t that a bitch!” Miles said. “How old are you, eighteen?”
“Sixteen, Mr. Davis,” he said. “I’ll be seventeen in a few months.”
“Sixteen? Oo-whee! Sit down and let’s see what you can do. Herbie, get up for a minute and let this boy stretch.”
“‘On Green Dolphin Street’? Yes sir, Mr. Davis, I know it.”
And he sat down at the piano, saw an ebony hand pick up the mute and heard Miles count as if he were far away, and saw himself, an Irish Catholic boy still in high school, who should know nothing about the world of jazz, begin playing smooth and easy, the melodies and harmonies already part of him, as always, lost to the music as if something else were operating, something else not of his own volition, some force deep within him that had no color or form but ached to find expression in the structure of the tune. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Miles, glowering thoughtfully, put the mute to his horn and began playing just like he’d heard him on the records, the horn’s voicing melancholy but not so that it made him hurt, the sound strong and defiant in its sadness. He followed Miles through the intricac
ies of the changes and never missed a beat when the tempo increased. He and Miles traded six or eight choruses, each time Miles daring him to come out and show him what he had learned all those afternoons at Mrs. Wilkerson’s house, the only place where he could forget the horrible pictures in the newspapers of his father lying dead on the floor, his head between the legs of a barstool, the face bloody, and his eyes staring at God’s face, like Grandma Brigid had said, her voice thick with sorrow though not yet crying.
Up there at Mrs. Wilkerson’s house in the Bronx there had been a piano on each floor and throughout the house pictures of all the greats, all signed, and she elegant and beautiful, smiling with Duke Ellington, the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Pearl Bailey, and Louie Bellson, even one with Charlie Parker—Bird not looking too happy about being photographed and as if he was about to turn away and reach for his ax, lying on a table by the stage. Mrs. Wilkerson saying the picture was taken down at Birdland when Parker first began playing there. Pictures everywhere so that as Billy studied and played, always hungering for more, mastering difficult techniques and always listening as Mrs. Wilkerson talked about “the music,” as she called it, not ever saying jazz or black music or Afro-American, but simply “the music,” being very strict about what was and what wasn’t considered such.
When he played the last note of “On Green Dolphin Street,” Herbie Hancock clapped and Ron Carter said, “Yeah!” Miles Davis nodded imperceptibly, deep in thought as Mr. Butterworth spoke to him.
“What did he say, Mr. Butterworth?” he’d asked when they were back outside in the wintry afternoon air, the cold burning his face and his body shivering with excitement, the midtown traffic forcing him to shout, but still hearing the muted horn and his own hands comping, weaving beneath the magnificent solo a solid, brave tapestry of chords for the great Miles Davis to ride on.
“He said you was right in the pocket and learning real good, son,” Pop Butterworth had replied. “He still don’t believe you’re only sixteen years old.”
“Seventeen soon, Mr. Butterworth,” he reminded him, but back then not having any notion of time in the sense of years, everything still filled with the urgency and mystery of not knowing, and only the music having any meaning. “My mom said she was definitely going to get the piano and that you should come with us to pick it out, Mr. Butterworth. Could you?”
And Pop Butterworth said, smiling sadly, that he’d be pleased to do so.
Billy sat in the park, recalling his life, until past midnight, when he got up and headed for home. As soon as he arrived, Lurleen asked him how things had gone. He said things had gone well. Uncharacteristically, she thought later, he sat and told her all about his visit with Vidamía, but did not discuss recalling more of the music, fearful that his skill might continue to return and then he’d have to play.
12. An Ideal Scenario
Every minute she wasn’t involved with one of her patients and at times even while they were unburdening themselves of their neuroses, Elsa’s mind returned obsessively to her involvement with Billy Farrell more than thirteen years before. What was she afraid of? Was it that she had been too hasty in rebuking him? She didn’t want Vidamía to even suspect this. Did she still yearn for his passion? There were times when she imagined what sex would be like with him now that she had matured. The thought both excited and disgusted her. In her husband’s eyes there was little doubt that Elsa was succeeding in raising an independent, broad-minded, non-docile daughter. To him it was ironic because his wife’s resistance to allowing Vidamía contact with her father was not for Vidamía’s well-being but was meant to soothe her own fears. Beneath those fears, like a large underwater monster talked about in theory but never seen, there lurked a preponderant need in Elsa to control Vidamía’s life.
Vidamía, on the other hand, continued working toward creating the right circumstances for seeing Billy Farrell again. Whenever she could, she called Maud and asked for advice on how to handle her mother, confiding in her paternal grandmother in a way she found more satisfying than she did when talking to Ursula Santiago, on whom she leaned emotionally, but who didn’t understand her concerns and always encouraged her to try to see things from Elsa’s point of view.
Grandma Maud talked like one of the older girls in high school, brash and knowing, except that her language reminded Vidamía of the black-and-white films of the forties, with those fast-talking, wisecracking ladies who threw caution to the wind and barreled their way through every difficulty.
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” she’d say. “Just hang in there till we figure it out. And whatever you do, keep your chin up.”
For Maud Farrell the matter of her granddaughter and the problems she was having with her mother created an enormous dilemma. Her own motherly instincts and feeling for Vidamía were overwhelming, and any indication that the girl was suffering because of her mother made her so angry that on more than one occasion she thought of taking the train to Tarrytown and giving Elsa a piece of her mind. Reason always prevailed and she remained neutral, sensing that to become involved would create more problems for her granddaughter. However, the picture she was getting of her granddaughter’s mother convinced her that she was dealing with someone whose screws needed tightening, as she told Ruby Broadway.
“She’s a bitch on wheels, Ruby,” she said, as they sat drinking coffee. “It makes me wanna go up there and slap her.”
“Oo-whee,” Ruby had said. “You Irish people are sure one violent tribe, ain’t you?”
“Well, what would you do?”
“Don’t ask me. You’re the mother. What would you do if somebody started messing with your child? Knowing you, they’d end up hamburger. Why she gonna be any different? Remember she’s Porto Rican.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“They’re very emotional people.”
“So I should just forget about it?”
“I ain’t Dr. Spock, and I ain’t no Einstein, but I don’t think you got much choice unless you wanna make more problems for your grandchild.”
For Vidamía the next few months were an emotional tug-of-war with Elsa. Halloween and Thanksgiving, usually times of great excitement and fun, turned sour with Elsa’s worries and complaints. Ursula Santiago, her health beginning to fail, had come up for Thanksgiving and immediately noticed that the household was ailing. She spoke to Elsa, but Elsa denied that anything was amiss. During dinner there were long silences and looks of exasperation from Vidamía, and on more than one occasion Barry looked pleadingly, for understanding, to the now frail figure of his mother-in-law. When he drove Ursula Santiago back to the new two-bedroom apartment that Elsa and Barry had bought for her in the high-rise development not far from where she had raised her children, she inquired as to the tension. Barry explained that Vidamía had found her father and Elsa was upset.
“El rubito?” she said, calling Billy “the little blond one.”
“Yes, I think so, Ma,” Barry replied. “Billy Farrell.”
“I remember. He was in the war with Joey. But why is Elsa upset?” Ursula asked.
“I don’t know. She’s upset about what this is going to do to Vidamía,” Barry said, pulling away from the tollbooth. “She’s acting crazy. Una loca. What’s the matter with her?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it is, I hope she gets over it,” Ursula said. “Vidamía’s no dummy. Between you and me, I don’t think Elsa was cut out to be a mother. That is a terrible thing to say about my own daughter. But if you ever want to have children, you better find yourself a new wife, because Elsa won’t help you.”
“I know that, Ma,” Barry said. “Don’t worry about it. Vidamía’s good enough for me.”
Elsa’s outbursts over Vidamía’s resolve to see her father were persistent and each day more strident. He was irresponsible and most likely psychotic; too damaged by the war, and who knew what his children were like, not to say anything about his wife.
“She’s from the South,
right?” Elsa said.
“I think so,” Vidamía replied. “What difference does that make? You don’t know her. Why are you judging her?”
“I’m not judging her, but she’s probably uneducated and primitive.”
“Mami!” Vidamía had shouted. “You don’t even know her. As a matter of fact, she graduated from college.” Grandma Maud had said Lurleen was very kind and gentle. “A school in Tennessee. She has a degree.”
“Oh, really?” Elsa said, pursing her lips and closing her eyes in what she imagined was upper-class snobbery. “What? TAC—Tennessee Agricultural College?”
“What if she did? What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, unless you’re planning to start a new kind of farming on asphalt or concrete. You did say they were living on the Lower East Side.”
“Fine. Make fun of other people. Be superior. If you want, I’ll find out what she studied.” At that point Elsa got a strange look on her face, got up from where she was sitting, and walked over to where Vidamía was curled up reading on the sofa.
“How do you plan on doing that? Are you sneaking down to see your father?”
“Mami!”
“Well, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then how would you find out?”
“I’ll call Grandma Farrell and ask her.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Elsa said. Whether she had reached the limits of her patience regarding the subject or the threat to her authority was too great, Elsa became even more strict. “Until further notice you are forbidden to have any contact with your father’s family.”
“That’s not fair,” Vidamía said, her eyes becoming moist, the hurt of her mother’s strictness constricting her throat and chest. “You’re treating me like a baby.”
