No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Having trotted through Hunter College in record time to obtain her bachelor’s degree, and her master’s from City University, Elsa was conversant with IQ tests, Stanford-Binets, and a textbook full of other criteria for measuring intelligence. Yet despite her considerable intellectual training, she made a critical mistake. She corrected Vidamía’s attitudes of superiority while believing in them privately. Utilizing her many hours of listening attentively to her professors and beginning to hone her style of addressing the less fortunate, she lectured.

  “Honey, you mustn’t say that about people,” she said. “In any case, the expression ‘the stuff of stars’ refers to the chemical makeup of the human body. All it means is that the same chemicals that exist in the moon, sun, stars, meteors, comets, and all celestial bodies exist in human beings, therefore we are star stuff. It has nothing to do with Hollywood. Theoretically, all people are equal. As ordinary as people may appear,” she went on, “deep inside there is a core of equality which we must respect and help develop in everybody. Do you understand that, sweetie?”

  “Everybody?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Even if they’re like Rosie Slotnick?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Elsa said, suppressing a desire to laugh, understanding perfectly her daughter’s predicament since all that her nine-year-old neighbor wanted Vidamía to do when she went to her house was to play with her vast collection of Barbie dolls and their array of boyfriends, while all Vidamía wanted to do was look at Dr. Slotnick’s medical books because the diagrams intrigued her.

  “Really, Mommy? Rosie?”

  “Especially Rosie,” Elsa reiterated, growing serious again.

  “All five-point-something billion people?” Vidamía asked.

  “I don’t know the exact number, but yes,” her mother said.

  “Okay,” Vidamía said and went off skipping across the living room floor, out onto the porch and into the garden, as if the moment had contained just one more adult-manufactured piece of information. As with all things, she thought about it and in time the experience had an impact on her and remained with Vidamía forever, erected in the middle of her being as a monument to be revered. It wasn’t so much that her mother’s wisdom was necessarily to be respected, but that the notion of everyone’s being equal made her feel as if she truly and rightfully belonged in the world. From then on, Vidamía, with a pronounced aristocracy which most people found charming, went out of her way to find commonality with others and in that way fulfilled what she deemed was her responsibility to aid them. By the same token, when she met people of superior intellect she felt neither fear nor shyness, and rather than being dazzled she accepted their brilliance as something quite natural. Out of personal concern for her status Elsa had unwittingly tapped what is perhaps the most natural state of humanity, that of wishing to cooperate and create harmony with others rather than produce strife. Having established that all humans were equal, Vidamía was free to observe more subtle characteristics in the people around her.

  Therefore Vidamía, observing her father as she slap-thumped her washtub bass, deduced that Billy’s renewal of acquaintance with the small black man must have affected him adversely, and although he appeared calm as he strummed his guitar, he was now more troubled than ever. Suffice it to say that, when it came to her father, Vidamía chose action over theory, so that watching him that day as his friend Alfred Butterworth left, she was convinced, now more than ever, that she must do something.

  She had loved her father instantly, the connection to him so natural that subsequently she felt as if she had known him all along and he hadn’t been absent from her life those first twelve years. From the time she’d met him at her Grandma Maud’s apartment, a bond was created which perhaps wouldn’t have been as solid had he raised her and been a party to disciplining her, to disappointing her, to denying her attention when he was in the same room, which all fathers at one time or another do. Whatever the reasons, their relationship was one of mutual admiration. He was dazzled by her beauty and innocence, and she by his melancholy and the utter bulk of his person, both his physical size, but more prominently, and therefore of greater attraction, the psychic baggage he carried wherever he went. She was, after all, in many ways, her mother’s daughter, so that the conversations with Elsa’s colleagues, who often visited, her exposure to the literature of psychology, to journal articles, and the entire therapeutic nature of her mother’s practice all affected her. While in the opinion of some people Vidamía’s and Billy’s acceptance of each other seemed too perfect, that is how things were between them. Vidamía often thought of asking why he had never attempted to contact her, why he had abandoned them, as her mother had said. But, heeding Lurleen’s advice that she not ask too much of him, she was simply grateful for his presence in her life now.

  She recalled that first summer with the family, when she had turned thirteen. Elsa and Barry had driven her to the Lower East Side from Tarrytown. Elsa, although more than familiar with the neighborhood, appeared shocked at the contrast between their own comfortable lifestyle and the squalor of the Lower East Side, forgotten images of her youth attacking her senses. With each minute she grew more tense, and eventually resorted to a surreptitiously ingested dosage of tranquilizing pills, later laughing darkly to herself, since she had wanted to get away from the neighborhood because of drugs after seeing her girlfriend Milagros and her boyfriend die of overdoses, the two of them found dead on the floor of his aunt’s house.

  They parked the silver Mercedes—the new one—and Barry opened the trunk as Elsa stood watching nervously, the whistle on the lanyard around her neck a relic from those years before she’d married Barry, when she’d come home late to her mother’s apartment from classes and her full-time job counseling at the college. Getting off the train at Grand Street, she’d walk the deserted winter streets, ever alert for a mugger, the whistle clutched in her hand, thinking that, because of her clothes and her books, in the dark she was just another white person, never conscious that in spite of the people’s many faults they instinctively recognized when someone was trying to help himself and was therefore off limits. Nothing had ever happened but she still carried the fear deeply ingrained in her being. She had retrieved the whistle from a drawer in the ironing room of her house in Tarrytown, going to it instinctively when she agreed to allow Vidamía to spend time with Billy.

  “Hurry up, Barry,” she said sharply as she stood looking up and down the street as if what they were doing was illegal and she needed to be on the lookout for the police.

  Vidamía had wandered off to look at the empty lot next to the industrial building where her father’s family lived. The weeds in the lot created a fascinating landscape, from which protruded an old refrigerator, discarded tires, and an assortment of trash. In the back of the lot there was a huge ailanthus tree and, like children around a mother, several young saplings. When she heard her mother, an edge of hysteria in her voice, Vidamía returned and stood between them. Her mother was asking Barry where the place could be since the only structure on that side of the street was a factory building and everything on the other side, except for a tenement at the end of the block, was abandoned. Vidamía pointed at the building and said that this one was the place.

  “This is one-forty-three,” she said. “Daddy said to ring the bell that says Farrell. The fifth floor.”

  “This place?” Elsa said, supressing her disgust at hearing her daughter refer to Billy Farrell in such filial terms. “Barry, she can’t stay here. Look at this block. Can you imagine what it must be like at night? We can’t go through with this.”

  Calmly ignoring her mother’s protest, Vidamía went to the metal door and rang the bell, above which had been painted roughly in green letters: FARRELL. Two minutes later, the door opened and out came a blond girl with short, shaggy hair. Billy stood behind her, inside the door, watching nervously. The girl was about the same height as Vidamía, dressed in high-water bib overalls, a T-shirt, and black
high-topped sneakers with mismatched laces, one green and the other pink. She threw the door open, swept her hand to point at her father and said, “Tada,” as if he were about to make an entrance onto a stage. Once Billy had the door, she came forward and kissed Vidamía on the cheek. Vidamía returned the kiss and they hugged. They hadn’t seen each other since Christmas, although they must have spent a thousand hours on the phone between December and the beginning of their school vacation, nearly six months.

  “Looking good, Vee,” Cookie said, turning her attention to Elsa. “I’m Hortense McAlpin Farrell,” she said. “Friends call me Cookie. You must be Vidamía’s mother.”

  “Cookie?” said Elsa, arching her eyebrows.

  “Yeah,” Hortense said, looking defiantly at Elsa, so that Elsa nearly took a step back. “Cookie Farrell.”

  “How you doing, Cookie?” Vidamía said, as if to back up her sister’s assertion, looking again at Cookie’s eyes, which seemed bluer than she remembered them from her visit at Christmas. “This is my mother, Elsa, and my stepfather, Barry.”

  Cookie immediately extended her hand to them.

  “Please don’t be shocked by the neighborhood,” she said, as if she could read Elsa’s mind. “Everybody’s got an attitude, but nobody bothers you as long as you’re cool. Hey, that’s a nice car. Is it all paid for?” And then, pointing back to Billy, she said, “This is my father, Bill Farrell. Your father too, kid. But I guess you know that. Right, homegirl?” Her father, feeling uncomfortable and squinting in the sunlight, nodded at Elsa and at Barry, his eyes shifting from the car to his shoes and then to the open door of the building. Elsa was more beautiful than he remembered her but he felt no emotion toward her. Perhaps he should but he felt nothing. Elsa, on the other hand, was in a state of shock and didn’t want to consider whether she was attracted to Billy. He seemed heavier, but it didn’t look like he was drinking much. She avoided his eyes and wanted to be away from him quickly.

  When the pause grew too long, Cookie stepped in. “You folks sure look like you could use a glass of lemonade,” she said. “Yo, my mama makes the best lemonade east of the Mississippi. Anyway, east of Broadway. You gotta check it out, you know what I’m saying?” she added and grabbed Vidamía’s bag. “Damn, girl, what you got in here? You didn’t bring your own silverware and cooking pots, did you?”

  The profanity didn’t go unnoticed by Elsa, who shot Barry a quick look. They followed Billy inside, and, immediately after the door locked behind them, Elsa felt compelled to ask Barry, in a whisper, whether he had remembered to lock the car. Barry said he had and then Billy led them to an industrial elevator big enough to transport several large racks of overcoats, that being its purpose for more than sixty years, until the early 1970s, when the Dorfman Overcoats patriarch, Solomon, became too infirm to supervise the business and none of his sons wanted to run the factory.

  The elevator crept up slowly, each creaking inch making Elsa more nervous; she wanting to ask if the mechanism was safe but not daring to open her mouth for fear that the movement might cause an imbalance in the workings and bring about an accident. They arrived at the fifth-floor landing after what seemed an eternity to her, though in fact it had been a mere thirty seconds, the elevator being in perfect working order, serviced periodically by Felix Gutierrez, who worked for the City of New York. Felix took care of elevators in the projects, and his children went to school with the Farrell children. He and Billy had become friends. The two of them had been in Vietnam around the same time. Billy had asked Felix if he had known Joey. Felix said he’d grown up in Brooklyn.

  When Billy pulled on the canvas belt to throw open the up-and-down doors of the elevator and they stepped out of the lift and were led through a door, what assaulted Elsa first was the vastness of the world in front of her. It was as if rather than a room she were being shown an in-door park. She rejected the loft outright as cluttered and ill-kempt. For Vidamía, however, the only thing she could compare it to was a castle. She was immediately overwhelmed by memories of Christmas, and tears came to her eyes, much as if she were returning home after a long absence. The walls were bare brick and the floor was wood, polished to an abnormal smoothness by the leather of thousands of shoes shuffling back and forth, day in and day out, of the men and women who sewed fine overcoats. Here and there, as if there were invisible walls, were areas for different family activities: a playroom, a nursery, an area for schoolwork. Along one of the walls, using two-by-fours and drywall, Billy had created rooms so that each of the children had his or her own private place.

  At the end of the loft he had built a large bedroom and a platform for a king-sized mattress for himself and Lurleen. Lurleen had made rag quilts for their bed and each of the children’s. Each room had a loft bed, and beneath it a desk and a place for storing clothes and other belongings. Since Vidamía’s visit at Christmas, Billy had built a room for her. Lurleen had made a quilt for her bed.

  “Welcome to the Farrells’,” Cookie said. “This is the living room,” she added, pointing to an area halfway into the loft. There, placed in the semblance of a living room were two couches and three stuffed chairs, all rescued from sidewalks where they had been discarded because of tears or holes. Each one, however, had been repaired with odd colored patches so that every piece had a personality of its own. Against a plywood wall there was a television set, and here and there were mismatched tables and lamps.

  When the guests were seated, Cookie brought Lurleen over and introduced her.

  “This is my mother, Lurleen Meekins Farrell. Everybody, even my dad, calls her Lynn. Fact you can call her most anything, ’cept late for lunch. Just joking, folks,” she’d said, doing a fair imitation of Lurleen and her fake hayseed routine. Lurleen said how do you do and immediately offered her two guests glasses of lemonade. “You girls can get your own,” she said, as Vidamía and Cookie were heading for the kitchen. Lurleen then pointed out Cliff and Fawn and then the blondest little girl sitting in a little yellow rocker holding a blue bear. “That’s Caitlin,” Lurleen said. “She’s going to be two years old,” at which the little girl, looking very serious, held up two fingers and everyone laughed.

  Elsa, sitting on the edge of one of the stuffed chairs, watched the two girls out of the corner of her eye, gulped her lemonade, and, checking her watch, announced that she and Barry had to leave. She kissed Vidamía hastily, gave her a few whispered instructions, particularly regarding the matter of calling her every day, and then left the loft, thanking Lurleen for the lemonade, although she felt that it was too tart; again warning Billy as they were going back down on the elevator that if anything happened to Vidamía she would hold him personally responsible. Billy looked at her pityingly and said he’d look after her and she shouldn’t worry.

  “Well, you can’t blame me for worrying,” she said. “I can’t believe you’d want to live down here. We leave and you people move in. Why? What’s the charm? The East Village? I can’t believe this. It was the Lower East Side when I lived here. All of a sudden it’s the ‘East Village’ and white people are dying to live here. Why do you want to raise your family in a factory? Unbelievable.”

  “I’m sorry,” Billy Farrell said. “But it doesn’t cost me anything.”

  “You’re squatting?”

  “No, I just take care of the building.”

  “For who?”

  “The Dorfman brothers. Their father had an overcoat business. He died. They keep talking about knocking it down and putting up a high-rise, but I don’t think they can get the zoning law changed. A couple of years ago they talked about making apartments out of the floors and renovating the building.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Barry said, enthusiastically, computing rapidly the number of apartments they could have on each floor and fishing into a pocket to produce his card. “Here’s my card. Tell the owners to give me a call if they’re interested in financing the plan.”

  “Are you crazy?” Elsa said to Barry. “Do you actually believe
he’s going to give the owners your card and do himself out of a place to live?”

  “No, I will. I’ll tell them to call you,” Billy said, taking the card without looking up. “We’ll be okay,” he added.

  Once outside, Billy said goodbye and watched Elsa and Barry drive away. As he returned upstairs he wondered what had happened to Elsa to make her so mean-spirited. She still looked beautiful, but she seemed bitter. He tried to imagine what would have happened if they’d stayed together, then put the thought out of his mind.

  As soon as Elsa was gone, Vidamía breathed easier. That first summer, the time spent with them, was the best of her life. Vidamía recalled the evening she and Cookie had met her girlfriend Rima and Rima’s mother and they’d taken the train down to City Hall and gone to a loft over on Greenwich Street to someone’s by the name of Alice with paintings against the walls, but a nice place. Going up the stairs, they heard what sounded like an engine. When they got inside everybody was sitting on the floor and Cookie said, “Be cool, they’re chanting. Just watch Rima and her mother.”

  You had to take off your shoes but it didn’t bother Vidamía because her feet were hot. They sat in the back and pretty soon someone gonged a bell and everybody started reading from a little book, and Rima was showing Cookie how to follow the words and Rima’s mother was showing Vidamía, but she still couldn’t follow. After about twenty minutes they started chanting, but she couldn’t make it out too well, except at the end, when it started to sound like what Rima was saying, which was “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.” What she liked most about the evening was the way they explained that a person could change his destiny; she didn’t know whether she believed it or not, but it made her think of her father.