No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  When she spoke to Lurleen about the problem, Lurleen shook her head and said that he was suffering from a war-related ailment, that he’d gone to the Veterans Hospital a couple of times, but that he functioned pretty well, given what he’d been through. She’d asked what had happened, and Lurleen explained, as best she could, that her father and uncle had been on patrol and had been ambushed by enemy soldiers. She said that as long as they kept him involved in playing simple tunes he was relaxed, and that is why she had thought up the idea of the family band. Vidamía let it go at that, fearful she might precipitate another episode that would cause him discomfort as it had the last time when she’d asked about the piano.

  Most days when they played their music in the subway stations there were always forty or fifty people around their band. Cookie was always moving. She’d finish singing and then would once again pick up her saxophone, the string of pearls rattling against the horn where they had seemingly grown. No one in the family understood or questioned how the pearls had cleaved themselves to the instrument, certainly not little Caitlin, almost five years old, who, day after day, sat on Cliff’s trombone case, playing her one maraca, always in the same rhythm, no one worrying that she might be an oddity in such a musical family because in a couple of years she would surely pick up an instrument and begin playing as if she had been trained for years, her eyes staring off blankly, like she’d learned the technique of being there but disappearing into space like their father, her gold-blond hair falling in her face.

  They stopped playing and her father watched Lurleen fold her accordion—Lurleen, whom Grandpa Sanderson had taken him back to Tennessee to find, and she looked it, all snub-nosed and agrarian, her hair so blond it looked nearly white but washed-out from having the kids and living from hand to mouth down on the Lower East Side; the children talking like they were Southern Puerto Ricans or something, from listening to their mother at home and then going to school and being out in the street with the rest of the kids, the only one oblivious to it all being Fawn, who looked like an ice-cold angel, so beautiful that it hurt you to look at her for too long, her innocence right out there as she stood, not sat, hour after hour behind her drums, perfectly keeping the beat and singing into the mike when it came her turn; effortlessly standing in back of the big ridiculous bass drum on which it said in red circus letters: THE SOUTHERN CONSTELLATION; standing there in a toobig faded gingham dress that had been taken in after Cookie could no longer wear it.

  And now her father, in his I’m-sorry-to-be-disturbing-you manner, said, “Thank you very much” and “God bless you” to the people dropping dollar bills and coins into the bucket and explained that this number was a song of pain and regret and Lurleen counted one-two-three-four and they went into “After You’ve Gone,” Cliff blowing his heart out and Cookie counterpointing the wah-wah of the trombone with her own brutally lachrymose saxophone and then singing torch and meaning it since she had already lost it, at fourteen, which Vidamía, two years her senior, had not, with her boyfriend from Seward Park High School—Elsa’s alma mater, which she now called Sewer Pork, because that’s what it was, she said, betraying a bitterness that Vidamía couldn’t quite fathom.

  15. A Diaphanous Curtain

  The whole summer went like that, from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, three days a week, setting up their underground camp mostly in parts of the Times Square station, where the 1, 2, 3, 7, N, and R lines and the shuttle to Grand Central converge and people stop to buy Latin records or a hot dog. Once in a while they got a treat and their father bought doughnuts, which upset Lurleen and she’d go on a trip about how bad refined sugar was for a person. No, Lurleen didn’t waste her college education, explaining to Vidamía once that she’d majored in music with a minor in nutrition, speaking in that slow, wry voice so that Vidamía didn’t know if she was being put on, but figured she wasn’t since there was no refined sugar anywhere in the house or in the food they ate; if the recipes called for sweets, Lurleen would use natural honey.

  Most of the time, however, they ate egg salad or ham-and-cheese on big wedges of homemade whole wheat bread and lemonade sweetened with honey, which Lurleen had Cookie and Vidamía make every night after supper at their big loft down there in East Hellhole, New York City, as Lurleen called it, all the letters scrunched up together and whining so that it sounded like Easheelhol, Kneejerkcitee.

  In the evening, before there was a television in the loft, Lurleen would let them all sit at her feet while she sat in a rocker and told them stories, which made Vidamía jealous because her mother never did anything like that; made her so jealous that the first few nights she sat way at the other end of the loft, against the brick wall so that she could hear the droning of the elevator and barely make out Lurleen’s voice talking softly about the planetary system, and the children, her half sisters and half brother rapt, their faces gently illumined by the string of bare lightbulbs hanging above like some hastily made constellation of her father’s godly invention; sitting there and thinking that it had been a mistake for her to have contacted Grandma Maud and found these Farrell people who were stranger yet than her own; not meaning her own, because these were as much her own as the others, except that they were so strange, all these blond people. But inching closer as Lurleen began talking about being a little girl and going to visit her aunt Vivian who lived in Louisiana and had a beautiful voice; telling them a story about a young man crossing the swamp and being attacked by alligators and finally meeting a beautiful girl and falling in love with her, asking her to marry him but the girl saying no because the one she loved was far away out west and she had sworn to wait for him, and then Lurleen singing:

  O’er swamps and alligators

  I’m on my weary way,

  O’er railroad ties and crossings

  My weary feet did stray;

  Until at close of evening,

  Some higher ground I gained,

  ‘Twas there I met with a Creole girl

  On the Lakes of the Pontchartrain.

  “Good-eve to you, kind maiden!

  My money does me no good.

  If it were not for the alligators,

  I’d stay out in the wood.”

  “Oh, welcome, welcome stranger!

  Altho’ our house is plain,

  We never turn a stranger out

  On the Lakes of the Pontchartrain … .

  On went Lurleen’s beautiful, haunting voice, so that all week long Vidamía thought about the story, which wasn’t sad or happy but bothered her, the last verse of the song repeating itself insistently in her head:

  At home in social circles

  Our flaming bowls we’ll drain,

  And drink to the health of the Creole girl

  On the Lakes of the Pontchartrain.

  She finally went to Lurleen that first summer and asked her was she saying “a cruel girl,” and was the girl cruel because the man loved her and she didn’t love him? Lurleen smiled and reached out and smoothed Vidamía’s hair so that it made her feel tickly inside her chest from the happiness of being touched by her, and Lurleen said no, she wasn’t a cruel girl but a girl from a Spanish or French family, like herself, but in Louisiana.

  “A Creole girl,” she said.

  “Am I like a Creole girl?” Vidamía said.

  “Yes, darling. Very much like a Creole girl.”

  “Are Creole girls beautiful?” she asked, feeling very small.

  “Yes, very beautiful,” Lurleen said, hugging her so that Vidamía could smell the sweetness of her breath and her baby milk for Caitlin, and Vidamía felt safe there with her new family.

  “You play an instrument?” Cookie had asked that first summer.

  “No, I don’t, Hortense,” Vidamía replied.

  “That’s okay. We’ll teach you. Maybe the tub bass. It’s easy, but I gotta ask you to do something, kid. Real special, like,” Cookie had said, imitating George Raft or some other movie gangster she’d seen on TV.

  �
�Sure,” Vidamía said.

  “I don’t want you to get uptight, but could you do one little thing for me?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t call me Hortense, okay?”

  “Okay, Cookie.”

  “Thanks, kid. I guess it’s a cool enough name down in Turn-and-see, where my moms is from, but here in the neighborhood it sounds like I’m from outer space or something goofy,” she said. “You know, like Horton from Dr. Seuss, and whatnot.”

  Their laughter was raucous and long. They were in the park down by the East River and Cookie went on explaining really fast how a tub bass was made, explaining that you had to find a nine-ring washtub, drill a hole for the string, and then you took a broom handle and cut it, then drilled a hole to put the string through, and then put a knot on the string so it didn’t slip back out. Depending on the key you’re playing in, you shift the stick back and forth across from the middle out to the edge, Cookie explaining that her mother knew how to make and how to play the homemade instrument.

  Cookie then went into a pocket of her bib overalls with the one strap hanging loose and pulled out a rock and flung it way out into the water.

  “You see any rats let me know,” she said. “I clocked one last week. Knocked it into next year. Right between the fucking eyes. Just signal me the direction with your eyes and don’t move an inch. I carry rocks all the time. Practice. Okay?”

  “Practice for what?”

  “In case boys get fresh and wanna start shit.”

  “Sure.”

  “You have hair yet?” Cookie said, turning away from the water.

  “Hair? What hair?” Vidamía said.

  “On your pussy.”

  “What? Are you crazy? Don’t talk like that, Cookie, please.”

  Vidamía’s face felt hot and she had a terrific desire to either start running or screaming, she couldn’t tell which.

  “You got titties, so you gotta have hair. Mama says maybe next year I’ll get mine, but I’m only gonna be twelve so I don’t know. Mama says she got her period when she was eleven, on her birthday. Fawn says she’s never gonna get titties or hair. She’s our sister but she’s a little weird. Her thing down there is kind of strange and she won’t let anybody see her naked.”

  “Strange?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. Mama says we gotta respect her privacy, but nobody gives a damn about mine. I think we’re all musical geniuses, and Mama says we ought to have at least five pianos in the loft so that each one of us can practice, including her. She’s a Rachmaninoff expert and Papa was what they called an up-and-coming white giant of the jazz piano before the Vietnam War. He jammed with Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter when he was just a kid, fourteen or fifteen. I’ll play you some of their shit, too, when we get back. You gotta check out ‘Sketches of Spain.’ That is some serious music, girl. You have a boyfriend?”

  “No, there aren’t any boys around where I live,” Vidamía lied. “You see them in school, but all they want to do is grab your hand or ask you if you want to do it.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty disgusting. This one boy in my homeroom, his name’s Victor, took his thing out and showed it to me and my girlfriend Myra. It was all red and crooked. I hated it. It didn’t have hair all over it, so Myra said maybe it was made out of rubber or something. You know, like a trick thing.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “So, what about chanting? You like chanting?”

  “Chanting?”

  “Yeah. It’s real cool. My girlfriend Rima does it. She and her mother are gonna take me to a meeting. You wanna come?”

  “Sure. What do they do?”

  “I don’t know. Chant, I guess,” she said and began whooping it up and doing a war dance. And then they both broke into an uncontrollable gaggle of giggles, as Lurleen would say. They walked out of the park and up the street with more of the Rican Spanish coming back to Vidamía from the time she was a little girl and they lived with her grandmother, and the times they visited after moving, everything looking familiar like she had been there all along; and fascinated by the notion that her father had been a pianist, a jazz pianist, whatever that meant, the entire matter sounding very romantic; and wondering why they couldn’t just have one piano and take turns; deciding right there and then she’d ask her father why they didn’t have one.

  She later regretted bringing up the subject of the piano, because all it did was bring tears to his eyes and make him walk out of the loft, into the elevator and down into the dark, which swallowed him up for two straight nights, and when he returned it was like he had aged ten years. All she’d said was, “You know, Daddy, we should get a piano so everyone can play. I’d like to learn.” When he didn’t return she’d gone to Lurleen and told her she was so sorry, and Lurleen said she shouldn’t blame herself because things like that happened with him.

  “He’ll be all right,” she said. “When he’s ready he’ll come back.”

  And he did, and she told her father she was sorry, and all he did was tousle her hair and then hug her to him and tell her she was going to be all right, except that she felt like she was the one who should be providing solace for him, her father.

  And that’s the way it went that first summer, four years before, Vidamía getting to know her family and learning to play the tub bass and to do a few soft-shoe numbers like “Tea for Two,” but totally confused about this new door she had opened in her life, so that it felt as if she had stepped into a big room that extended into tomorrow all the way to the Pacific Ocean and up into Alaska, or so it seemed; the room populated by these musical creatures who talked so easily about the universe as if it were their own front lawn, which they didn’t have because they lived in harmonious semi-poverty down there in Loisaida, which is what Cookie called the Lower East Side in that second year, explaining just like she was some hybrid Puerto Rican that this poet by the name of Bimbo Rivas, whom she knew personally from readings in Tompkins Square Park and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, had renamed the neighborhood, and that the name was a combination of a town in P.R. by the name of Loiza and the “Lower East Side.”

  “Get it? Loisaida.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Vidamía said. “But Bimbo? What kind of name is that?”

  Cookie got all serious and shook her head.

  “What do you mean, what kind of name is that? It’s a Taino name, that’s what we are,” she said, stumbling over her words and her identity. “I mean that’s what Puerto Ricans are. Tainos. Bimbo means Guerrero Celestial, girl.”

  “Ghe- what?”

  “Guerrero Celestial,” Cookie said, proudly. “Celestial Warrior in the Taino language. Somebody who fights for the people. I’ll introduce you to him next time I see him.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Vidamía said and then Cookie admonished her.

  “You better get hip, homegirl,” she said. “Get with the program and stop acting like some retard hick, okay? Míja, ¿qué es lo tuyo? Are you some kinda jíbara?” going back and forth from English to Spanish like she was born to code-switching or Spanglish and whatnot.

  And then one day during that first summer, they all agreed Vidamía should play the tub bass, which Lurleen doubled on when she wasn’t playing her fiddle. That was when Lurleen got her accordion from the closet and a flowered hat she’d bought at a thrift shop over by SoHo that really made her look like a hayseed, even though she was so smart, teaching them about astronomy and southern constellations like Triangulum Australe, Pavo, Crux, and Volans.

  And right there and then, smiling like a lifetime of spring mornings, she broke out a big pan of corn bread and they all sat down and ate it with margarine and clover honey, getting all sticky in their fingers and hair, and that’s when Vidamía figured out that, plain and simple, like Lurleen said, she was family to these people and there was no turning back the clock or trying to figure it out. Realizing this made her feel complete and grown up.

  She watched Lurleen eat a few little crumbs, lick her fingers, and then get up and take down h
er dulcimer and sing about maidens who cried the whole night through and trees that bled and magical deer and stones that walked the earth; sitting spellbound listening to her voice which was sweeter than clover honey, and Vidamía watching her father, Billy the Kid Farrell, knowing she was now responsible for him, and whatever misfortune he had suffered she would share. She was only thirteen that first summer, but decided that since Billy was her father, and since she had gone out of her way to find him, she was up to the task of taking care of him, no matter how much effort or pain that might mean.

  16. Meeting Monk

  One morose day in August when the skies finally became tired of carrying the clouds, appearing as if they had thrown up their arms in petulant resignation to let the rains crash vertiginously down at a slant from an easterly direction, people hurried through the tunnels beneath Times Square, wet but relieved because the passing of the storm made everything fresh and sweet. Eleven-year-old Fawn Singleton Farrell, observing the scurrying of the people and smelling the clear air which had penetrated the subterranean atmosphere, thought perhaps nature had added fabric softener to the air. She bit into the sugar doughnut her father had bought during a break and let the words form randomly in her head.

  Aberdeen Gabardine

  I’m going to the fair

  Don’t bring water

  But bring talc for

  The lady’s care.

  She sat very still, repeating the words over and over because then she’d remember them and write them in her secret book when she got home. Because if one looked at these verses, one might get the impression that they were from some old poem or riddle or game dating back to Elizabethan times, but they were her own creation, perhaps induced by some of the songs her mother had sung from the time she was an infant, she lying in a wooden cradle that Billy had found while emptying out an apartment on Clinton Street, and Lurleen singing and playing her dulcimer. So absorbed was Fawn that she appeared to be both chewing and mumbling at the same time.