No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  He explained that on the other side of the river was Brooklyn. Oh, yes, she said. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A View from the Bridge, and Thomas Wolfe’s story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” And he said “What?” and she laughed and said never mind and asked if they could go to Brooklyn sometime, surprising him by saying that she wanted to go to Coney Island and the Botanical Gardens and maybe Ebbetts Field. She knew the Dodgers had moved to Los Angeles but was disappointed when he told her the old Dodger ballpark had been torn down. She said her favorite team was the St. Louis Cardinals.

  “Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, Red Schoendienst, Marty Marion, and then Bob Gibson and Mike Shannon. Tim McCarver, their catcher, is from Tennessee. Yes he is, and he is a lovely-looking man like you. He was my favorite and I had his baseball card.”

  “Well, maybe we can go to Shea Stadium when the Cardinals come into town to play the Mets.”

  “Okay,” she said, as the cab approached Houston Street. “We’re almost there, aren’t we?”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I just feel it. The way you described the neighborhood. Look, there’s a synagogue.”

  “You’re too much,” he said.

  She was taken a little aback by the odd-looking apartment, one room lined up after the other, and the bathtub in the kitchen, but within a month she’d scrubbed and cleaned and sewn and mended and by the time she was through, the place looked so pretty that her friend Brenda Torres whom she’d met at the supermarket, said she should go into interior decorating. She read an article in a magazine about utilization of space and drew up a plan for building a loft bed in their bedroom so that she could set up a little desk underneath where she could read, plan meals, work out budgets, and write letters to her mother and father and Aunt Ida.

  They had so little money and Billy was so incapable of earning sufficiently to supplement his disability check that in time she began inquiring and eventually was able to get work teaching music in, of all places, Brooklyn. She had been disappointed by the poverty she found there. All the children seemed as if they had been consistently beaten and ridiculed, their sullenness and pain oozing from them. Eventually, she’d managed to get herself transferred closer to home, and that’s where she remained for nearly fifteen years—except for the times that she took off to have the children and take care of them—getting to know the people well enough so that she always found someone to care for them while she was teaching and they were not yet ready for play school. But as the children grew up, she worried about what was to happen to Billy. At noon she got up from the rocker and made herself a sandwich, thinking that they had never gone to see the Cardinals at Shea Stadium, but Tim McCarver was doing the Mets games, and that pleased her. She went to the TV, turned it on, and switched it to the game, listening to him, the announcer’s voice reminding her of home as she cut vegetables.

  28. Of Promises and Leprechauns

  One day toward the end of that summer of 1988, her fourth year of spending July and most of August with her father’s family, Vidamía, by now nearly obsessed with the notion of restoring her father to some semblance of normalcy, asked Lurleen why Billy had such a fear of playing the piano. Lurleen explained that because of a wound to his head in the war he couldn’t recall much music. She said that maybe not being able to recall the tunes was too painful and it caused him to fear the piano, but she didn’t actually know, because Billy wouldn’t talk about it, the questions always driving him deeper and deeper into himself. Vidamía said he didn’t seem to have any problem playing the guitar. Lurleen explained that it wasn’t the same. The kind of music he’d played was a lot more complex and required the player to improvise within the tune, at times deviating from it and reinventing an even more complex structure than the original. And it would appear from the little that Billy had explained to her that all of that was gone and he was no longer able to improvise.

  “Knowing that you could do something and then not being able to do it can be frightening.”

  “Improvise? Making it up as you go?” Vidamía asked.

  “Yes, but within a certain structure,” Lurleen replied. “Like ‘My Favorite Things.’ Did you ever hear John Coltrane play that tune?”

  Vidamía shook her head and Lurleen went over to the sound system and cued up Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” and asked her if she recognized the tune. Vidamía nodded.

  “The movie with Julie Andrews. The Sound of Music. I remember now.

  “That’s right, but listen,” Lurleen said. “Coltrane did some amazing things with the tune.”

  She went on to explain the technical aspects of how John Coltrane reinvented the music and added his virtuosity to a fairly uncomplicated tune. When they were finished listening to the music Vidamía said she felt as if she had been spinning around for a while, except that she didn’t feel dizzy, but as if she had been lifted up in the air and was floating.

  “And Daddy could do that?”

  “That’s what I hear,” Lurleen said. “He was amazing in the same way. Billy had an opportunity to play with Miles Davis.”

  “But Daddy doesn’t remember the tunes?”

  “It’s complicated but, yes, something like that. Then there’s the problem of his fingers. The technique requires pretty fluid and rapid movement of the right hand on the piano.”

  Vidamía explained what she’d found out when she stayed overnight for a weekend the previous winter at her friend Elizabeth Reich’s house in Tarrytown and her sister Frances, who was twenty and studied the cello at Juilliard, had overheard them talking about Billy’s inability to play the piano because of his missing fingers from an accident in the war. Elizabeth had told her of a three-fingered technique for playing the harpsichord that dated back to the sixteenth century. She asked Vidamía which fingers Billy was missing. Vidamía tucked in the middle and pinkie fingers on her right hand with her left, so that her own looked similar to her father’s. Elizabeth tucked in the ring and pinkie fingers and moved her three other fingers rapidly and said that maybe Billy could play in a similar way.

  She told the story now to Lurleen, who smiled kindly at her and nodded, refreshed by Vidamía’s enthusiasm to bring Billy out of his misery. She asked what she had in mind.

  “Well, I thought maybe I could talk to him,” she said. “He trusts me.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to try, but don’t be disappointed if he doesn’t respond.”

  “Thank you,” Vidamía said and reached forward and kissed Lurleen.

  To understand the burgeoning of Vidamía’s new idea, we must look at her great desire to see her father happy. Like a well-seasoned and simmering stew, the idea of helping Billy had been distilling slowly in Vidamía for a number of years, the ingredients softening and blending with each other, the sauce growing thicker and its fragrances more tantalizing.

  Irish stew is a staple and whether concocted in the factories of Dinty Moore or Mrs. Meehan’s kitchen, it warms the heart and lets one go forth to battle the effings, as does the Rican sancocho, or salcocho, as it is called in different parts of the Island of Enchantment, meaning Borinquen. This tropical stew contains not beef, potatoes, and carrots with a bit of celery, but pork, yautía, plantains, corn, green bananas, and the appropriate condiments, including salt, pepper, onion, garlic, sweet peppers, and cilantro, or coriander, which sounds like some sort of bird or maybe a French weapon. But whether Rican or Irish, be it in Kilkenny or Caguas, Cork or Camuy, Donegal or Dorado, Belfast or Bayamón, Ulster or Utuado, Mayo or Mayagüez, Galway or Guayama, Connemara or Cacimar, this concoction must cook slowly, to allow all the ingredients to mix with each other, draw from each other flavor and strength, boil and simmer and settle before it can be served. Sometimes, it tastes better on the second or even the third day, depending on how large a stew has been initially prepared.

  A similar process began when Vidamía realized that in her wallet she held the final ingredient for helping her father. She didn’t know how sh
e would accomplish this, but it seemed to her as if the idea of purchasing the piano, which began to form during her sixteenth-birthday party, now created a new urgency in her.

  She fell asleep that night thinking of how she would approach her father and explain that she’d like to help him try to play the piano again. She hoped it wouldn’t frighten him, but she had to make an attempt. If he was that good, and if that was what he loved doing, then perhaps his avoidance of the music was making him withdrawn. Great-grandpa Buck and Great-grandma Brigid had said he could play. Grandma Maud said it was a waste that he wasn’t playing. Mr. Butterworth had said that back before the war there weren’t too many who could play as well as Billy.

  Vidamía woke up with the same concerns. She dressed in jeans and a floppy shirt buttoned to the top and put on orange socks and her black high-top sneakers. When she came into the kitchen Lurleen was already making breakfast. Her father was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the paper.

  “Good morning, Mama,” she said.

  “Morning, darling,” Lurleen said. “You want some coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” she said, sitting on a chair across from her father. “Good morning, Daddy.”

  “Good morning, honey,” Billy said, looking up from the paper. “How you doing? We ain’t playing today. Why are you up so early?”

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I gotta go and empty out an apartment,” he said, returning to the paper.

  “Can I go with you? I can help you.”

  Billy sipped his coffee, ran a hand through his beard and then his hair and shook his head.

  “Naw, that’s the last thing I need. Your mother coming down on me cause I got you working emptying apartments and selling the stuff and then cleaning out the place.”

  “I’m not going to tell her. Please, Daddy.”

  He thought a moment, relented by nodding his assent, and went back to reading the paper until Lurleen brought him eggs, grits, and bacon with four pieces of toast and more coffee. Vidamía had eggs and toast and some juice and around eight o’clock she put her Yankees baseball cap on backward. They took the elevator and walked the few blocks to Ludlow Street. Although she had walked these blocks many times, as they crossed the street she noticed, as if for the first time, the piano store. She was going to wait until it was time to come back to the loft for lunch to talk to her father about it, but there it was. It was like an omen, like it was meant to be. Like Rima had talked about karma—like it was her karma to want to do this and have the piano store be there on the way to this job.

  They spent the better part of the morning putting the place in order, separating clothes, books, dishes, glasses, and anything else salvageable into boxes. The furniture was useless and Billy spent the next hour carrying the heavier pieces down from the second-floor apartment to the sidewalk. She tried thinking of ways to bring up the subject of his playing the piano, but he was totally absorbed in what he was doing and it wasn’t right to disturb him. Around noon Billy said they’d go back and eat lunch and that he really appreciated her helping, but now he had to bring the boxes with the books and glasses down the street to see if he could sell the stuff, and he’d feel ashamed to have her see him doing this.

  “I won’t feel ashamed, Daddy,” she said. “I don’t care what you do. I’d never be ashamed of you. You’re my father. If you just worked at this and nothing else I wouldn’t be ashamed.”

  He nodded and looked at her, his eyes hurt and his left hand rubbing his beard.

  “This is all I do, baby,” he said.

  “You play music, Daddy,” she said. “That makes people happy. You should look up and see their faces once in a while. All those people that come by when we’re playing. They’re just regular people. Some of them are going back to their jobs after lunch, maybe some of them just got fired; or maybe they’re out looking for work, or going in to quit work; or maybe they’re coming from visiting someone in the hospital. Whatever they’re doing they stop because they wanna take a break from their lives, and when we play it makes them forget what they have to go and do. If it wasn’t for you they wouldn’t be able to do that.”

  “Naw,” Billy said, turning and looking out of the window to the other tenements. “That was all Lurleen’s idea. She’s the one who thought of it.”

  “Yeah, but if you didn’t play music and go with all of us we couldn’t go out there and play. When you’re with us we feel like we can go anywhere and nothing can happen to us. We feel safe when we go with you. And we love playing music with you. We all play because we like playing, but we also do it to make you happy. Because we know that you like to see us happy.”

  When Billy turned there were tears in his eyes. He couldn’t say anything but stood there, his eyes to the ceiling, the tears running down his cheeks and his head nodding slowly. He sat down on the windowsill and took a bandanna and wiped his eyes.

  “Sometimes when we’re playing,” he said, looking down at the worn linoleum floor, “I get so much into the music that I forget you’re my kids and I think I’m with my parents and you and Cliff and the girls and Lurleen are my brother and sisters.” He looked up, his eyes helpless, pleading. “That’s crazy, ain’t it? I shouldn’t even be telling you stuff like that.”

  “No, it’s beautiful,” she said, and before she could think how she should put it, she asked, “Could you try playing again, Daddy, please?”

  There was a momentary panic in his face as if he understood her request perfectly, and immediately he disappeared behind the curtain of fear from which he peeked out at the world. She grabbed his face and made him look at her, pleading with him not to go away.

  “Please,” she said. “Please, Daddy. Don’t, please. I’m not asking you anything terrible. Please, could you try?”

  “Try what, baby?”

  “Don’t,” she said. “You know what I’m asking you.”

  “I don’t, baby.”

  “Try playing the piano again.”

  At the mention of the word his eyes grew dark and he turned away to look out of the window, shaking his head violently. At one point he started to go outside, but she blocked his way and told him not to. And then she was sobbing uncontrollably from the emotion of the request, as if in asking she had been drawn into the vortex of her father’s horror, so that she felt as if at any moment she would faint from the effort. She felt as if within the room there was a force of tremendous magnitude, fighting against her and pressing on her chest, and a voice telling her that she had gone too far and she’d have to answer for her boldness.

  “You can’t do this,” she said. “I don’t know everything that happened but you can’t keep this up. We love you and we see what not playing does to you. You gotta try, Daddy.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, holding her desperately to him, smoothing her hair as she nestled into him, and she, feeling his beard and his hair and the tobacco and sweat of him. “Please don’t cry. Please don’t,” he was saying over and over.

  She began to relax and he let her go and was again shaking his head.

  “I can’t, baby,” he said, holding up his hand. “You need five fingers to play the piano.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I talked to my girlfriend’s sister, Frances Reich, who studies cello at Juilliard and she said there’s a way you can play the piano with three fingers. It was a technique they used for the harpsichord.”

  “You’re too much,” he said, shaking his head and mussing up her hair. “Too much. With the first two fingers and the thumb, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, momentarily deflated.

  “That’s not the same.”

  “It doesn’t matter, because you haven’t tried, and you should.”

  “Honey, let’s go eat lunch.”

  “No, you have to promise you’ll try.”

  “What am I gonna do with you? Just thinking about it gives me a headache and makes me wanna go for a long walk off a short pier.”

>   “Very funny,” she said, not grasping the allusion. “I’ll go with you.”

  He looked at her and frowned, for a moment unsure if she understood and was willing to die with him, but worried now that she was truly serious about what she was saying.

  “Why does it bother you so much?” he said, his voice adult but not at all fatherly, inquisitive as to her motives, not suspicious but truly wanting to know what she thought.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah, I really want to know,” he said, a small smile crossing his lips at her boldness.

  “Can I speak and not feel like I’m gonna hurt your feelings?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “You wanna know what kids think is really important about their parents?”

  He shook his head, helplessly, afraid to tell her that it didn’t matter because whatever it was he couldn’t fulfill her expectations. He was lost and whatever had taken place in his life it was too dark and deep for her to penetrate, for he had allowed someone who trusted him with his life to die, and therefore whatever trust she had in him was false, something she had made up but which had nothing to do with him.

  “I’m not too good at that kind of thing, baby,” he said. “Let’s go eat lunch. Okay?”

  “No way,” she said, strongly. “Your family loves you.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, it hurts them to see you like this.”

  “I can’t help it, baby.”

  “Yes, you can. You know what we love about you? That you haven’t given up. With everything that’s happened to you in your life, losing your father and then the thing with Uncle Joey, you still hold your head high. And everybody says you’re a fantastic piano player. I’ve spoken to everybody, Daddy. Grandpa Buck, Grandma Brigid, Grandma Maud, and Mr. Butterworth. They all say it. ‘He was a great piano player.’ They say that when you were seventeen there were famous men who just stood around watching you play and shaking their heads about how much feeling you could put into the music. I don’t know much about jazz, but what I’ve heard from Cookie and Cliff and the little that Mama explained, you gotta be pretty good to get that kind of praise from people. I know that if you tried, you could play, Daddy. I know it.”