Thoughts Without Cigarettes (28 page)

Still, I had enough gumption to demand a graduation present from my hardworking father. For some reason, I had the figure of one hundred dollars in my head, and my pop, wanting to please me, somewhat reluctantly came up with the cash. (“
Eres loco?
” I remember my mother saying. She had good reason—it was well more than a week's pay at the hotel.) I don't know why it mattered so much to me; I always had other ways of making money. I suppose I did so because some of the tonier kids I knew were sent off to Europe or given checks for what to me were unimaginable amounts, thousands of dollars. Or because I wanted some recognition for the fact that I'd dragged myself through school, or simply, perhaps, because I was sick and tired of hearing that we were poor (mainly from my mother). And no doubt something of the spoiled brat in me still lingered. What did I do with it? I pissed it away one night, taking a girl named Diane, whom I knew from Brandeis, to a cool night of jazz, to hear Red Prysock performing at the Half Note, which had by then moved uptown to the fifties. I'd heard it was the kind of club that asked no questions if you had enough money to pay for their five-dollar drinks, and in any case, even as a teenager, I had the kind of serious expression on my face that aged me by a few years. With a bad crush on this tall and pretty girl, I'd hoped that alcohol would make a difference with her. We'd dated a few times, and I even got the chance to meet her mother, in their apartment on Central Park West and 101st Street, and we got along well enough, though I could never get anywhere with her, my biggest secret, which inhibited our conversations, coming down to the fact that I felt too ashamed to tell her much about my family at home; and she was guarded with me as well, though I learned that her father, who was never around, worked as an editor in the film industry. That night I played the big sport, throwing my pop's money away. Red Prysock was good, and we had a table near the stage, but my notion of plying her with rumloaded tropical drinks came to nothing. She seemed, in fact, annoyed that I was trying to get her drunk, and while she had very little to drink, I, feeling the fool, did my best to get wired myself, which did not go down well with her at all: You see, her own pop, as I would find out one day, had his own problems with alcohol too.

In general, however, as much as I might have been a brooding presence, my pop seemed happier than ever in those days. He seemed especially pleased by how my older brother had fared: Since coming back from his stint in the air force, as a Beau Brummel, the sartorial style of Europe having rubbed off on him, he not only made up the credits he needed for his high school diploma but had gotten into Brooklyn College, where he studied art with some fairly well-known painters, who were encouraging of him. Graduating, with that profession in mind, he began teaching art in a Brooklyn high school. Best of all, whatever differences he may have once had with my father seemed to be forgotten.

He'd turn up with the woman he'd married in a quiet civil ceremony, and she, of mixed Italian and Jewish descent, with her raven hair and dark eyes, hit it off famously with both my mother and my father, though from what I could observe, she had taken a particular liking to my father, who, doting on her, kept bringing up, and quite happily so, the notion that he would love to see them bring a
bambino
into the world. I can only recall one moment of awkwardness between them. She had just started working for the city of New York and, over dinner perhaps, the subject of her salary had somehow come up: I don't remember any exact figures—perhaps it was something like seven thousand dollars a year—but that number threw my father for a loop and somewhat saddened him. After twenty-five years at the Biltmore, he had yet to earn as much himself. (His shoulders slumped, he smiled, nodding, but his eyes showed something else.)

That was the summer, of course, of the moon landing. Nightly, when the progress of that mission was broadcast, my mother and father and I would watch it, like most of the country, on television. As Neil Armstrong first alighted on the lunar terrain, uttering his famous speech, my pop, most comfortably situated on his reclining chair, seemed truly enchanted—to think that someone of his generation, who'd been raised on farms in rural Cuba, could live to witness such a monumental act of daring, must have gone through his mind. His lips, I recall, parted slightly at that moment, the way they would when he'd see a baby.

I mention this because it's the only thing I can really remember about the days preceding another journey I'd make. When my aunt Maya in Miami, speaking to my father by telephone, brought up the notion that I go down there for the rest of the summer and work for my uncle Pedro, it seemed a good idea. I would get to spend some time with family and make some money along the way. I certainly didn't object, and while it wasn't the sort of adventure I might have been craving, it was something different for me to look forward to, though I can't imagine that it made my mother happy.

A month or so short of my eighteenth birthday, I was so selfinvolved that on the day I left for Miami, and my father, sitting on our stoop, wanted to embrace me just before I got a lift down to Penn Station in a neighbor's car, I sort of flinched and waved him off. Maybe I finally begrudgingly allowed him a kiss on my neck, but what I mainly remember is sitting in that car's front seat with my little suitcase and a guitar set in back, and feeling slightly put-upon seeing him smiling—perhaps sadly—at me as he settled on that stoop again and reached for a cigarette. I can recall wondering if I'd been a little cold, but before I could change my mind, the car started up the hill and the last I saw of him was this: my Pop in a light blue short-sleeved shirt, a pair of checkered trousers, and sneakers. He had just gotten his dark wavy hair cut short for the summer, and without a doubt he, always liking to smell nice, had dabbed his face with cologne. Some girl was skipping rope a few steps away and as my mother, Magdalena, watched me leaving from our first-floor window, my father turned to say something to her. Then he stood up to say something to me, and waved again: I think the last words he mouthed to me were, “
Pórtate bien
”—“Behave yourself.” Not that I attached much importance to that, and if I said anything back to him, I don't recall.

Of course now I wish I'd been more receptive to him in those moments, but the truth is, I didn't know it would be the last time I'd see him alive.

This is what happened: I'd been down in Miami for a few days and put to work by my uncle on one of his sites, mainly hauling bags of cement around. My uncle, incidentally, as a former musician, took an interest in the fact that I'd brought along a guitar and, on my second or third night there, had me follow him into his garage, where he kept his old double bass, the very one he had played for years with the Cugat orchestra. Bringing it out, he spent a few hours trying to teach me some old Latin standards like “Perfidia” and “El Manicero,” my uncle, in Bermuda shorts, attaining such a look of fierce concentration on his face, even if only playing an alternating bass line, while I, trying to fathom the arrangements, did my best to keep up with him. We weren't bad nor good together, but he was not discouraging of me, even if he had better things to do. Along those garage walls were numerous photographs of my uncle Pedro in his glory days, posed on bandstands with his fellow musicians, all in evening coats and tails, an air of glamour about them: Some found him seated in a posh club with celebrities the likes of Errol Flynn, and, as I recall, Desi Arnaz. What he must have made of me, with my longish hair and blue jeans, I can't say, but he, who had once been quite dapper in his time, seemed to have decided that he would have to take me downtown at some point to get me better clothes. As things turned out, there wouldn't be much time for that to happen.

My aunt Maya, by the way, of course, rebooted her efforts to lure me away from home. I won't go into too many details about that—with Cubans, some things never change, and her old animosities and disparagements of my mother picked up where we had left them some ten years before, but mainly she kept to her old mantra that I would be much better off with them and that it was my mother at the heart of my father's problems in life. (I suspect that once we had that telephone installed after my pop's heart attack, she'd had some conversations with him when he could hardly get his words out straight.) But she also had some new tricks up her sleeve: Where before, she'd ply me with ice cream and toys and clothes, Maya, knowing that boys will be boys, did her best to fix me up with a neighborhood girl, a pretty Cuban who, if the truth be told, did not seem particularly thrilled by the notion. Her name I honestly do not recall, though I can tell you that she had longish auburn hair and a figure that in tight jeans was too luscious for me to bear. In any event, come the first Saturday after I'd arrived, we went out to a club near Miami Beach, this loud crazy place jammed to the rafters with young kids, where, at about nine that night as we were dancing—that is to say, while I, considering myself a musician, attempted to dance in that darkened room, its ceiling filled with twirling stars, and the music of Joe Cuba's Latin boogaloo hit “Bang Bang” raging through enormous speakers—I felt this sudden and strange fluttering going up the right side of my body: It was so pronounced that I began shaking my arm wildly, and I must have had a strange expression on my face, for my date, if that's what she was, looked at me oddly. Then, as quickly as it came, it went away.

Sometime later, perhaps an hour had passed, I heard my name announced over the loudspeaker system. It was muffled, the music was so blaring, and at first I ignored it, until, during an interlude between songs, I heard it clearly: It went, at first in English and then in Spanish, “Would Oscar Hijuelos please come to the front office.” When I reached that office, my aunt Borja was sitting inside, a look of utter bewilderment and exhaustion on her face. “Come on,” she told me. “We have to go home.”

Not once did anyone tell me what had happened, but I somehow knew. Back at my aunt Maya's so late at night, I had to pack. My aunt Borja had called the airlines, trying to get us a flight to New York, but the best she could do was to book something quite early in the morning, which is why, I suppose, we spent that night not in Maya's house but in a motel not far from the terminals. I honestly wish I could describe how Maya behaved throughout, except that I couldn't look at her without seeing tears in her eyes, while Pedro, a stoic sort, shaking his head, had hung around by a kitchen table without saying a word—what could anyone say? We left well past midnight. At the motel itself, with my aunt Borja, who could have been my father's female identical twin, in a bed across from me, sighing as she smoked cigarette after cigarette (she lived to be ninety, by the way), I passed the late hours kind of knowing what must have happened but without knowing anything at all—it was as if no one could say more than “Your
papá
has had an accident.” I watched TV, an old-time movie:
Enchantment
starring David Niven, one of those classy tearjerkers Hollywood used to make—now and then I'd look over and see Borja wiping a tear from her eyes—and I kept on watching that film until its elegiac conclusion, at which point the station went off the air. Though my journey home early the next morning remains dim, I can remember coming into an apartment crowded with neighbors, and my mother's unbridled, chest-heaving bereavement; Borja's kindness and composure throughout; and meeting up with my brother that next Monday. Sometime in the early afternoon, we went downtown to Bellevue Hospital. There, someone at a desk escorted us to a certain room. It was a simple room with curtains drawn closed. At a certain moment, as we stood there, the curtains opened to a large window, and from some floor below, we could hear a lift operating. A platform came up, and on it rested my father, covered in a dark hooded shroud.