Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (11 page)

A few weeks later, my Uncle Fermin’s wife, Elpidia, came to stay for several days. She took my place alongside my grandmother in the Murphy pull-down bed that each night emerged like a mastodon from the closet where it lived. I slept in the bathtub while she was there, placing a heavy blanket on the porcelain and a hard cushion from the sofa for my head.

I don’t know why Elpidia came but I recall how relieved I was to go off to P.S. 99 in the mornings and escape the sounds of her deep sighs and the refrain that accompanied them,
“¡Ay, Dios! Qué me ayuda!”
Her face was always damp with recently shed tears. I tried to learn their cause, but her conversations in the kitchen with my grandmother ended as soon as I entered the dinette, and the wall muffled their words.

When she left, I returned to my side of the bed.

*   *   *

I slipped into P.S. 99 as though I’d only been absent one afternoon. There were new students, among them two boys. One was tall and horse-faced and cracked his knuckles constantly. The other was blond-haired, tall but slender, whom I thought beautiful. He wore white shirts open at the collar, and he had a stern, cool expression on his face. I thought of a boy alone on a mountaintop, looking down on the world. He erased Freddie Harrison of Balmville from memory and took his place for nearly a decade. But for a long time, he didn’t give me a tumble.

One afternoon he asked me for the time. I glanced at the Mickey Mouse watch my grandmother had given me and told him. He said, “That’s just a cheap boy’s watch.”

*   *   *

I went to the movies every Saturday afternoon. My friends and I exchanged the sepia-colored photographs of movie stars we cut out of magazines. There was little as satisfying as settling down on the floor in the bedrooms of other girls, a heap of magazines nearby and scissors close at hand.

One stormy night I was visiting a friend who lived in another apartment house. Her older sister came in, her hair tousled by the wind and damp from the rain, saying in an exuberant voice, “It feels like the end of the world outside!” These words struck me as original, profound, and elegant. I wished I had said them.

*   *   *

I was the recipient of a paper sack stuffed with discarded clothes from my cousin Natalie, the daughter of Fermin and Elpidia. Stained slips, wool stockings worn thin at the heels, garter belts with flaccid suspenders, and ragged brassieres were all wound around each other like sleeping snakes. At the bottom of the sack was a print dress made of some slippery material—rayon, perhaps. It had a ropelike belt with tasseled ends that looped twice around my waist. I wore it to school, though it was far too large, and its pattern of large, ugly green flowers made it, somehow, unseemly.

Natalie, several years older than I, lived in a railroad flat with her parents, a grown-up sister, a younger one, and a yellow mongrel dog that bit everyone who came to the flat—or threatened to—except her father.

My grandmother and I made periodic visits to their flat in Spanish Harlem. It was a long journey from Kew Gardens on the new subway. My apprehension deepened as we neared the station in the city where we got off. Would Uncle Fermin be at home wearing a hat that hid his eyes? His skin was so white, his nose so like the blade of a knife.

On those long-ago Saturdays, when one of us managed to scrape up enough money for tickets, Natalie and I would spend afternoons at the Bluebird movie house on Broadway and, I think, 158th Street. Cartoons preceded the feature film, along with a serial,
The Invisible Man,
and were greeted by bursts of wild applause. Along with Olive Oyl and her long narrow feet and tiny head, I especially recollect Mickey Mouse, thin and worried-looking in those days, as if he’d just eluded a laboratory technician’s grasp, not as he looks today—plump, smug, and bourgeois.

And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall.

In the Bluebird, it was as though a woman sang stories larger than lives, about fate and love and evil enacted in shadowed rooms and wild landscapes I couldn’t enter, only glimpse from where I sat, rapt.

Some Saturdays, as we returned to the tenement where Natalie lived, we heard thumping and could feel through the soles of our feet the vibrations from my uncle’s radio, all the way down from the fifth floor to the sidewalk where we had halted. On Natalie’s face would appear a distressed, complicit smile, as though she held herself responsible for the noise.

It was not an ordinary radio. My uncle had built a plywood screen that covered the two narrow windows of the tiny parlor at the front of the flat, had fastened all the radio components to it in some way, and added two loudspeakers. Whenever he was in the flat, he turned up the volume as high as it would go.

The room felt ominous, as though something inhabited it that would, in the end, bring down the entire building. In summer, what breezes made their way up the street from the Hudson River a few long blocks away, were shut out by the plywood screen; in winter, wind and cold leaked in around its edges. My uncle sat in the only armchair in the room, wearing his coat and hat whatever the weather, except on the hottest days of summer, submerged in the uproar as though stupefied by it, the yellow dog at his feet growling, no doubt in baffled protest.

Neighbors stopped at the local police station to complain—only a very few tenants had telephones in those days—but the police never came. My grandmother would retire to one of the cell-like bedrooms, with its poverty-green paint on the walls, and lie on a narrow bed, one arm flung across her eyes and brow.

Elpidia had been born in Palmyra, a hamlet in Cuba, a few miles from my grandfather’s plantation. Fermin had run off with her, I was told by my grandmother—in a bland tone of voice that seemed to attach neither blame nor responsibility to him—to protest his engagement to the daughter of a neighboring plantation owner, an arrangement made by his father when Fermin was only a bad-tempered boy.

I puzzled over Elpidia’s reasons for marrying him. Perhaps she had been carried away by movie love or worship of some sort. Whatever it had been, she had come with him to the United States,
el norte.

To escape the fearsome radio racket as much as I could, I used to go to the kitchen to watch Elpidia iron on a spindly board that resembled a grasshopper. Grimly, as though she were trying to kill it, she struck at it with a small black iron she had heated on the stove. Whatever garments were spread on the board’s surface often bore scorch marks.

On other days of our visits to the flat, I would find my aunt by marriage slumped on a stool drawn up to the kitchen sink, weeping intermittently and silently, one hand supporting her chin as she stared down at the cockroaches that came and went with their hideous broken speed, now a pause, now a rush.

I don’t recall her wearing anything but a faded, stained brown cotton housedress. Her breasts looked like poorly stuffed small pillows. In one of them her death began. She developed cancer before her forty-fifth birthday, and after months of suffering, during which Fermin finally found work in the city sanitation department, she died of it.

In Olmiguero, I had learned to speak Spanish. Because of my grandmother’s resistance, or inability, to learn much English—even after decades of living in the United States, she spoke with a thick accent—I now spoke Spanish to her.

One late-winter afternoon, when it had grown dark around four, I walked into the kitchen, halted a few feet from Elpidia, and asked her why she cried so much.

“No se, mi hija,”
she answered, turning her kindly, utterly miserable face to me.
“No se.”
I don’t know, my daughter, I don’t know.

*   *   *

My grandmother took me to the theater to see a play she thought I’d like. As the long plum-velvet curtains drew apart, my breath quickened. But the play seemed foolish. It concerned a clownish high school student who was discovered to have made some unflattering cartoons of the principal and his staff. The audience roared with laughter when the cartoonist was sent to the principal’s office, where he stood, accused, sobbing in a manifestly fraudulent manner. From the seat next to me, I heard a sound of muted weeping.

A small dark-haired boy sat there, crutches drawn up beside him, one of his legs in an elaborate brace. His cheeks gleamed wetly in the light from the stage.

During the first intermission, I asked my grandmother why the boy wore the brace and used crutches. She guessed, she said, that he’d had infantile paralysis.

I realized that there wasn’t only one way to view the world outside.

*   *   *

My grandmother told me a story about her father. When she was my age, she had taken a walk with him on one of the broad streets in Barcelona called a
rambla.
He was counting aloud. She asked him what he was counting.

“Priests,” he said gravely.

*   *   *

A boy named Jay lived in the apartment house. His mother, a huge woman, came to visit my grandmother and sat on a kitchen stool, one buttock on it, the other appearing to float in midair. She was forceful and serene and seemed to want to take over our lives—but with the best of intentions.

One morning Jay pelted me with snowballs. He was a year or two older than I was. I stood with my back against an apartment house wall, a living target. I reported the incident to my grandmother, who passed on the news to Jay’s mother. “Why didn’t you pelt him back?” she asked. “Then he won’t play with me anymore,” I said. She looked up at the ceiling pensively. “I see,” she said, as if she’d seen more than I intended. That was her way.

That same year I often sat on the gray cement stairs of the rear service stairway and read stories to whatever children I had managed to collect, sometimes as many as four. After a few moments, my listeners began to wander away.

I read them fairy tales and
Gulliver’s Travels.
When I began
Treasure Island,
I lost them all during the opening pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale. When I looked up, I found I was the only remaining listener.

I made a friend, Bernice, after I returned from Cuba. Bernice and I had two enemies in our class, Janet and Georgina. Georgina had little bosoms like knuckles poking through the pink or baby-blue sweaters she wore to class. Both girls had small skulls covered with tightly permed hair. They smirked at us and muttered what we took to be insults, their heads inclined toward each other, their hands held like scoops over their mouths.

With Bernice I rode the new subway, which had opened a Metropolitan Avenue station. A clerk in the toll booth, handing me my change for a quarter, said, “Here you go, Jean Harlow.”

We went into the city to Radio City Music Hall because Bunny, as I called her, had a crush on a drummer in the live orchestra who looked like an actor of the time, Jack Haley.

She didn’t care what movie was being shown or what the Rockettes might do. I didn’t really love him, but I pretended to, and it was thrilling when the entire orchestra rose up from the pit, playing their instruments.

We usually got seats in the front row at the far right of the huge theater. After we’d been there three or four times, he seemed to recognize us. He smiled in our direction in a way I thought was extremely oily. But Bernice was enchanted by his shadowed features and black hair rising from the pit by degrees, and the way he kept his eyes on her when he wasn’t playing.

*   *   *

The boy I loved was a sphinx. His inscrutability was part of his charm for me. I wrote a detailed description of his looks as if I were drawing a topographical map of love, and then what I had to guess at, his inner life. While I was writing it in the dinette of our apartment late one evening, I was flooded with a kind of miserable happiness. He was always in my consciousness, more than he was, less than he was. Some years after, in early 1939, I visited my grandmother. On impulse I telephoned him. We made a date to meet and go to Flushing Meadows, where the World’s Fair was being held.

Harry James and his orchestra played, and we danced. We spent a good deal of time looking at an exhibit of a cloaked and peculiar car, the work of Salvador Dalí.

We stayed late at the fair. We found a bench where he rested his head on my lap. I looked down at him. In the dim light, his face was marmoreal, beyond mortal concerns. I heard later that he’d become involved with a tarty girl I knew slightly. She had breasts like little volcanoes and always wore a knowing smile on her
jolielaide
face.

*   *   *

My parents returned from Europe after a sojourn of three or four years, when I was eleven. They slid into my sight standing on the deck of a small passenger ship out of Marseille that docked in New York City on the Hudson River alongside a cavernous shed. They were returning home after their adventures, the most recent being their flight a few weeks earlier from the Balearic Island of Ibiza during the early days of the Spanish Civil War.

My mother had draped a polo coat over her shoulders—I suppose because it was a cool spring day—and she smiled down at my grandmother and me as we waited in the shadowed darkness of the shed. Sunlight fell in daggers through holes in the roof high above us.

It had been years since I’d seen them. They were as handsome as movie stars. Smoke trailed like a festive streamer from the cigarette my mother held between two fingers of her right hand. When she realized we’d spotted her, she waved once and her head was momentarily wreathed in smoke. The gangplank was lowered thunderously across the abyss between the deck and the pier. Passengers began to trickle across it. Suddenly my parents were standing before us, a steamer trunk like a third presence between them. I knew that trunk; I’d seen it in Provincetown years earlier.

“Hello … hello … hello,” they called to us, as if we were far away. They pointed out their luggage for porters, speaking to my grandmother and me in voices that were deep, melodious—not everyday voices like those I heard in Kew Gardens, but of an unbroken suavity, as though they’d memorized whole pages written for them on this occasion of their homecoming.