Thoughts Without Cigarettes (23 page)

He liked to read the
Daily News,
even the funnies, as if studying for a final exam, especially the sports pages, and always took a great interest in the Washington Senators baseball team, mainly because there were some Cubans in the lineup. He took me to see a Mets game once, when they'd just joined the National League and were playing the Senators, someone having given him the tickets at the hotel. (The Mets were horrible in those days and ever since I sat through that lackadaisical game, I've never cared much for the sport, I'm sorry to say.) Having worked a banquet held for a group of Japanese businessmen at the hotel, he came home with a five-thousand-yen note, and, truly believing it amounted to a lot of money, thought he'd have enough to buy a new television set, the sort that didn't conk out suddenly, until he took the note over to an American Savings Bank on 111th Street and Broadway—now El Banco Popular—and found out that it, so valuable seeming, was worth only a few dollars. (I went with him, and embarrassed after speaking to the teller with whom he had tried to cash the note only to learn that cashing it would cost almost as much as it was worth, he shook his head and shrugged. What are you going to do, right?) In his wallet, for some reason, he carried around a bawdy cartoon, always folded up, that obviously gave him a kick. I came across it one day on his dresser. It was of two characters, Harry and Bert Piels, popular advertising mascots for the Piels beer company: They were both bald and somewhat professorial looking—one tall and lanky and the other short and squat. In the cartoon, the short one, with exclamation and question marks shooting out of his head, was locked in an embrace with a nude, buxom, Amazonian woman three times his size, his eyes fixed on her pointy breasts, and a thought balloon with the words “
Oh boy, oh boy, now that's even better than beer!
” rising from his head. (Or something like that: Mainly, I wonder now why he carried it around in his wallet.)

Once, I found a twenty-five-dollar gold piece in the gutter. I have no idea how such a valuable thing happened onto the street, but when I brought it home to show my father, he told me, “
Bien hecho
”—“Well done”—and gave me a dollar for it. (For the record, I also found on the street a two-dollar Confederate bill, which, thinking it worth something, I kept for ages.)

We were always receiving visitors out of the blue—a lot of Cubans who'd recently turned up in the city, just like in the
I Love Lucy
show, which, by the way, my father liked to watch in the reruns. (With
The Honeymooners,
that was the only other show I remember his laughing aloud at.) One afternoon—I was about twelve—he received a few of these new guests: a plump dark-haired couple with an even plumper little girl, in from New Jersey, fresh up from Castro's Cuba, who had heard about a Hijuelos living in New York City. My father was wearing checkered slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, and white tennis sneakers that day—he favored sneakers of any kind on his time off from the hotel, where he would have to stand constantly on his feet—and after bringing them some refreshments in the living room and conversing for a while, he, coming out into the hallway, called me in from my room, where I had been reading comics or doing whatever the hell it was that I would do. He didn't often easily smile at me, but when I—in the midst of my early adolescent can't-be-bothered-by-anythingelse stage—lumbered down the hall and the couple stood up as soon as they saw me, my pop, beside himself, bowed as if announcing some sixteenth-century courtier at the court of the Spanish king. In Spanish, he said, “Oscar Hijuelos, I am pleased to introduce you to Oscar Hijuelos,” for that was, indeed, the fellow's name. Blinking affably, the other Oscar Hijuelos, who must have been about thirty at most, smiled and extended his hand to me for a shake. Then his wife by his side said, “
Hola, pariente
”—“Hello, relative”—and I shook her hand as well. We sat down for a while, the other Oscar Hijuelos (to this day I have no idea of the family connection) filling in my father on his doings in this country—I'd heard that kind of thing often, as if it were a drill: no job, no language, some help from Cuban friends, some from the government, the new world so strange, and yet, despite it all, somehow landing on one's feet. That other Oscar Hijuelos, with his wife and daughter, stayed for about an hour. My mother never came home to meet them. And once they left, promising to return, they never did.

In the meantime, while all those things were going on, my brother was away in the air force, at first in Biloxi, Mississippi, then in Lackland, Texas, and eventually in one of the hell zones of the early sixties, London, England, as an air traffic controller. In that time, squeezed between one of those lackluster winter days in our household, when ice formed on the windowpanes, a great snow began to fall. My father, having to go to work, got up that morning with blistering pains shooting across his chest. When he raised his arms, those pains, like rods being jammed into his bones, fluttered down to the tips of his fingers, and even then, when he felt his arms going numb, he, sitting back on the bed, tried to work them out, flicking his wrists wildly, the way people do when their hands fall asleep. But when he tried to stand, it was as if he were carrying a piano on his shoulders. Lulling for a while, he lit a cigarette. And then, taking a deep breath, as my mother dozed beside him, he managed to get to his feet. In the kitchen, searching a cupboard, he found some rum and, swallowing a huge swig, felt his body settling again. At a certain moment, down the hall in our dingy bathroom, the sweat on his face slackening off, he, feeling better and dressing, set off for work. He put on his hat, scarf, and London Fog overcoat, and, despite the snowdrifts, made his way across the Columbia campus to the subway, eventually to the hotel, where he, with those nagging pains in his chest, somehow made it through the day.

I remember nothing of that evening after he'd come home, except that he had gone to bed early. There he had lain all night, tossing and turning and gasping—according to my mother—and while a lovely snow continued to fall, come the next morning, at about five, when my father would usually awaken, he simply could not move. My mother, loving—and hating—him so much, prevailed upon our gentle across-the-hall neighbor, Mrs. Blair, on whose door she banged at that unearthly hour, begging to use her telephone to call Dr. Altchek in Harlem. That great old man, however disturbed from his sleep, turned up by six—I remember that under his topcoat, he wore pajamas—and within a few moments after making some examinations, he, as he had done with me those years before, declared that my father, having suffered a heart attack, should be rushed to the hospital.

That whole interlude of his initial recovery, during which my father spent some three weeks in a fifth-floor room of the Flower Memorial Hospital on Fifth Avenue and 105th Street (thank God for union insurance coverage) with a lovely view north over Central Park, I have to skirt. I will say this: He had his transistor radio to keep him company and, thinned down somewhat with the hospital diet, seemed to be extremely well. I sat by him on numerous afternoons, watching so many of his friends from the hotel and from around come by to greet him. After working more or less steadily at the hotel since 1945 or so, he seemed grateful for the time off, for the outpouring of visitors, and would sit up, smiling in his hospital pajamas, and somewhat optimistically, despite the IV line in his arm. My mother, at least when I was there, never came, not that I remember, though she surely must have. At one point he told me, “Whatever happens to me, take care of your mother.”

After he left the hospital, sticking to their diets and giving up smoking, he got even thinner and glowed, somewhat, from renewed health, the bad habits of those years left behind (his body must have been grateful). During that peaceful time, without any shouting in the house, my mother, though still worried about him, seemed far more content, and he, without taking a drink and not yet back working, acquired a more relaxed demeanor. Some things were tough, however—I can recall that we began to run a bigger tab than usual down at the corner grocery store, Whities, where he once used to send me to buy him cigarettes, and at Freddie's Bodega, because he couldn't bring his usual foodstuffs home from the hotel. And perhaps he went through a month or two without full pay (I don't know). But even if we didn't get a tree at Christmas that year, generally, things were good—we finally had a telephone installed, in case another emergency arose, a telephone to whose dial my mother affixed a cylinder lock. And my pop? At forty-seven, he was still young enough to look forward to years and years of life. He felt confident enough to buy the only new piece of furniture that I can recall ever coming into our house, an olive green leather easy chair with one of those extendable footrests, which he got on time payments from Macy's. Nightly, instead of hanging around in the kitchen, he'd stretch out in luxury, watching our always flickering television set.

By spring, when I'd come home from school, we'd pass a few hours taking strolls over to Riverside Park, where he was content to sit on the lawn, watching college girls go by, boats gliding along the water. He didn't need much, though, as I think about it now; he probably had too much time to reflect back on what had happened to him. Sometimes, out of nowhere, while looking around at the loveliness of the day, at the wisps of clouds in the fine blue sky, the sparrows hopping merrily on the grass, or at a lilting butterfly, he'd sigh, and with that, I swear, from him emanated a palpable melancholy—I would just feel it, almost like a shudder, rising from his body. In such moments, I am certain that he, trapped by some dark thoughts or emotions, probably wanted a nice drink. Probably, he felt nostalgic for the good old days when he could just take out a cigarette for a relaxing smoke—he was, after all, a creature of his generation.

He must have started back up with his bad habits, slowly at first, at the hotel, when, after some three months away, he'd returned to work. Down there, hidden from my mother's eyes, there came the moment, during a midafternoon lull at the Men's Bar, that he'd probably taken his first drink in a long time, and that warming elation, coming over him again, became something he could not continue to resist. And what would go more nicely with a belt of whiskey than a cigarette? After a while, he'd walk into our apartment with his face slightly flushed and think nothing of sitting down and, well, having a smoke. Just as often, coming home, in his trousers pocket, he'd have a pint bottle of whiskey stashed in a paper bag, and soon enough, once his friends started coming over again, the refrigerator began to fill with those sweating quart bottles of beer. My mother, beside herself with worry, became hysterical, and those nights, once his friends had left, of my mother scolding him continually in the kitchen also resumed, but with a difference: Where in times past she had reminded him of his old abuses, my mother now went at his carelessness in the wake of his heart attack—what she called “
un ataque del corazón
.”