Borrowed Finery: A Memoir Read online

  * * *

  When my mother was nineteen, she gave birth to me. At some point during her pregnancy, she also went to the house on Audley Street, and my father with her. But he and Leopold, whom he’d met in the navy during the early months of U.S. involvement in the war in 1917, left at once to board a tramp steamer bound for South America. As he left the house, my mother raced after him and hurled a bottle of sauce at his back. It missed, he told me, and he and Leopold ran off to sea like careless, triumphant boys.

  At a port in some Central American country, they disembarked and went to a hotel where my uncle smilingly, languidly, remarked that he didn’t feel like translating that day. He sat down in a handy chair and lit a cigar, listening with the air of a remote linguistic connoisseur to the struggle of a local fellow, who claimed to be bilingual, to comprehend and convert to Spanish my father’s questions about the cost of room and meals and then to turn the clerk’s answers into a dim semblance of English.

  * * *

  I went to Public School 99, a small elementary school that stood next to a large cemetery, which I explored in the afternoons after school. I read headstones as if they were the beginnings and ends of stories; death was inconceivable to me except for those moments at night when I awoke and listened to the beating of my heart. Some knowledge, not of the heart or of the mind, perhaps of the cells, informed me that one day that pulsation would cease.

  During the year on Audley Street, one night when I was within a blink of sleep, the door to my little room opened. At first I thought it was Vincent come to claim my bed, but it was my father.

  I had not seen him for two years. He didn’t turn on the light but left the door ajar, so that the hall light fell across the bedclothes, my upward struggling self, and his face. He spoke just above a whisper, perhaps not to wake me completely, but I was fully awake and full of longing and a prescient sense of loss. He could not have stayed for more than twenty minutes—he had dropped by to visit Leopold—and me, of course—but he assured me in the beautiful rumble of his voice that he would see me “very, very, very soon” and rose from the edge of the bed and left.

  I was distraught for hours. I felt a queasy emptiness in my stomach as I lay there in the dark. When I awoke in the morning, it seemed my father had visited me in a dream.

  * * *

  At P.S. 99, the first class of the day was arithmetic, taught by Mrs. Goldberg. One morning she introduced us to banking, providing each of us with a facsimile of a blank check. After we had worked a few minutes, she called upon me to read what I had written.

  “Pay to the order of my father—” I began. My classmates howled with exaggerated laughter and dropped their books on the floor. Mrs. Goldberg looked at me humorously and asked what my father’s name was. But I was mute, unable to answer. Mrs. Goldberg was not a torturer. She let me sit down and called on another child.

  But we were torturers. There were two vulnerable teachers, Miss Grady and Miss Banta. Miss Grady was rumored to have a relative on the school board who had gotten her her position. She had a large beauty spot that changed position frequently on her old apple of a face. Once she kept me after class and pleaded with me—reasonably, I think—to behave in class and stop making funny faces in the back row where I sat. She said she was appealing to my evident intelligence. I sensed weakness. Then suddenly I saw her, an elderly large woman with brown hair turning gray caught up in a loose bun at the back of her head, sitting slumped in the teacher’s chair, pitied no doubt by her relative on the school board and for a brief instant by me. I bowed my head too full of the sense of her to speak, and left the classroom.

  Miss Banta taught art. A classmate of mine and I wrote her notes pretending to be from an anonymous suitor. We found her telephone number and called her up in the late afternoon, imitating, successfully we thought, male voices. One day after class, she asked us to stay.

  “I want this to stop,” she said calmly, almost thoughtfully. “It’s gone far enough.” No weakness there!

  Our spelling teacher, a heavily freckled, pinched-looking woman whose name I can’t recall, came into the classroom one day with a sanitary pad poking up from her gaping pocketbook. The girls sat frozen. A few boys hooted. None of us, I think, had anything but a faint idea of the use of that contrivance of cotton and gauze. It had to do with being “grown up.” It had to do with sexual life.

  The girls were humiliated by the sight of it. Yet it had a kind of dark glamour. Full of a shadowy foreknowledge, we looked at the teacher with scorn. She had a careless, abstracted manner, and when she spoke to the class, she stared over our heads to the wall behind us.

  * * *

  On Fridays, the whole school, students and teachers, marched into the auditorium, where a radio had been rigged up to an amplifying system, and we heard Walter Damrosch’s Concerts for Children.

  “Now, children,” Mr. Damrosch would begin; then he would sing, unmelodically:

  “This is—the sym-pho-ny

  that Schubert wrote and never fi-nished.”

  It made an indelible impression on my brain, and when I hear that symphony today, I still sing Damrosch’s note-matching words.

  On Friday afternoons I went to the public library, where as often as not I would take out a book by Frank Baum, one of a series about an imaginary country named Oz. One day, a set of The Books of Knowledge turned up in the Audley Street house, bought for me, I suspect, by Leopold.

  Subjects were alphabetically arranged, and when I looked up one thing, the definition and information in it led me to other things. Looking through the volumes, pausing to read about beetles or Paris or aviation, was like continuing the tales begun in the National Geographics I had discovered in Uncle Elwood’s attic—pictures and words about life and its astonishments. The books in their red bindings breathed for me a kind of intimacy.

  * * *

  One morning my grandmother made me a different breakfast from the usual toast and cereal. She minced garlic and spread it on a slice of bread that had been soaked in olive oil. A memory stirred—something about Elsie. My arrival at school was greeted by my classmates with cries of mock disgust, hands outstretched to keep me at a distance.

  I was the foreigner in a school population made up largely of children from working-class Irish Catholic families. The final damning evidence of my foreignness was my grandmother herself, when she appeared in school on those days set aside for parents to visit classes.

  She did not resemble any other mother. She was older, of course. And she had a thick Spanish accent. As I looked at her sitting at a child’s desk, a hairpin worked itself loose from the bun she wore and fell onto the desktop. Her hair was not like the permanent-waved hair of some of the mothers. But I loved the bread soaked in oil and covered with garlic, and I didn’t give it up once I’d tasted it.

  Prejudice has its own headaches. I was a puzzle to my classmates. I was fair-haired and might have been taken for a Scandinavian. One branch of my relatives in southern Spain was descended from the emirate of Granada. What would the children have done if they had learned I had Arab ancestors from North Africa?

  As it was, they didn’t know what to think of me. They settled on halfway measures, tormenting me from time to time, becoming friendly when they forgot—as children did in those days—exactly what they were tormenting me about. But then their attention was diverted from me by the arrival of two boys, also “foreigners,” an Armenian and a French-Canadian whose accent was as thick as my grandmother’s. The three of us contrived a small country of our own.

  In a sense, garlic saved me, confirming my position as an outsider and preventing me from absorbing any unself-questioning assumptions about national or personal superiority.

  Time deceives memory. My circumstances seemed to have changed overnight, but it must have happened over months, slowly.

  The brick house on Audley Street was sold. My grandmother and I moved into the first of two apartments in a building on Metropolitan Avenue on the ever-widening ou
tskirts of Kew Gardens. Vincent disappeared. Frank was traveling in South America. Leopold moved into an apartment in New York City. I learned a new, longer way to walk to P.S. 99, but I used it only for a few months.

  One morning before I set off for school, my grandmother told me that in a few days she and I were going to Cuba to spend a year or so on a sugar plantation owned by a cousin of ours whom I was to address as “Tía Luisa.”

  I didn’t know where Cuba was, but I found it in a school atlas, a green lizard lying athwart a blue sea.

  Cuba

  My grandmother and I left Kew Gardens early one morning toward the end of 1931. We took the Long Island Rail Road to Pennsylvania Station in New York City, and as we carried our suitcases along the side of another train, nearly hidden by a rolling cocoon of steam, she told me that Tía Luisa owned the last car.

  How could one person own a railroad car?

  An elderly man hurried toward us. “Good morning, Señora de Sola,” he said, bowing slightly. “Let me take your luggage.” He looked down at me and smiled.

  Before he boarded a car with our suitcases, I glimpsed his pale blue eyes and white hair. My grandmother said his name was Prince and he was an English butler who was the head of Tía Luisa’s staff of servants. Among them, she told me, were Tía Luisa’s own seamstress, known as La Gallega to the staff because she had been born in Galicia, Spain, and her personal physician, Dr. Babito.

  I thought to myself that Prince’s smile was a sign that he forgave us for being poor.

  We stepped onto the platform. The entrance to the private car was partly screened by pots of palm trees reaching to the ceiling. Beyond them in a regal armchair dozed a small elderly woman. Her eyebrows were like black caterpillars that had come to a halt on her forehead, and her small bejeweled hands lay crumpled in her lap.

  Servants were moving about silently in the car. The carpet muffled the sounds of their footsteps as they arranged things in drawers.

  They slept in berths in another car, as I did. My grandmother spent the nights with Tía Luisa in a bedroom at the end of the private car. I heard later from La Gallega that on very hot afternoons in central Olmiguero, on the plantation she owned, Tía Luisa would rise from her siesta, creep to an open window, and shout for the officer, long dead, she had loved in her youth but not married, to present himself: “¡Mi coronel! ¡Mi coronel! ¡Adelante!”

  Despite these fits of madness, she was sane enough to run the plantation profitably with the help of her surviving son, Eli. Her younger son, a pilot in the World War, had been shot down. When I heard about him and his fate, I envisioned him descending to the earth gripping a spiraling rope of fire.

  A smell pervaded the private car that might have come from the palms or the earth they were rooted in, or something else in the atmosphere, I thought later: a ripe, green, warm smell from Cuba itself.

  * * *

  During the first month I spent in Olmiguero, I hurried out of bed as soon as I awoke in the mornings. I was mad to begin the day, its glowing yellow light shining through the slats of the wood shutters on the windows of a room near the servants’ quarters I shared with my grandmother. She might come to bed long after dark, after Tía Luisa dismissed her. Often she wasn’t dismissed, and I slept alone.

  In the vast kitchen where I ate fruit standing at a counter, servants buzzed and swarmed, halting for a few seconds in the preparation of breakfast trays to drink from their own cups of café con leche. They were harried by the nearly constant jangling of the bells in an open box affixed to the wall with numbers corresponding to the bedrooms of the waking household. I knew better than to try at such times to get the attention of Emilio, a cook and my friend in the kitchen, comical, plump, and good-natured. He and La Gallega, the seamstress, kept an eye on my comings and goings. But not on all of them, especially in the mornings when they were so busy.

  I usually went to the orchard, where oranges and grapefruit and bananas ripened on short thick-trunked trees. Scattered among them, bearing fruit I didn’t recognize, were thin tall trees that loomed over the orchard. Beyond them was a sea of sugarcane. The smell I had noticed on the train was powerfully present everywhere I went in Olmiguero.

  I spent hours in the vast formal garden. Gravel-covered paths wound among beds and hills of flowers. I saw Tía Luisa being pushed among them in a wheelchair by Prince now and then. She had a sulky, pettish expression on her face. Sometimes she was asleep.

  At the north side of the garden, dividing it from wild unkept land where pigs rooted and rolled, were two large cages, one filled with brilliantly feathered birds, the other with thin black and white monkeys that swung to and fro through the air from the branches of a dead tree. Sitting below them among rinds and cores of fruit was a cranky-looking fat gray monkey. His eyes blinked rapidly when I came near. I gave the animals my lunches—rice and beans, fried and salted disks of banana, a slab of meat—especially when the day was intensely hot and such big meals upset my stomach.

  At first I had felt exhilarated by freedom. But soon I began to be lonely. There was no one who said my name for hours at a time.

  * * *

  Three wooden steps descended to the ground from the back door of the kitchen. I took them at a jump. One morning I found a stone-faced man in a suit waiting near the steps. “Vamos a la escuela,” he said, in a spiritless voice, walking a few steps, looking back to see that I was following him. I did, kicking up fans of dust, wondering if I’d find a friend in the school where he was leading me.

  We left the garden and Tía Luisa’s grand house, passing the ingenio de azúcar, the sugar refinery, from which issued a great throbbing like a monstrous heart. The man abruptly stopped. He said, ‘“Aquí.” We had arrived at the chapel, where I had been many times before, dreaming through masses. As soon as we entered, he knelt. I heard his knee creak as he rose after crossing himself furtively. He accompanied me as far as the altar. Nearby was a black curtain he drew aside to reveal a closed door. I heard the voices of children.

  For a moment, I was afraid. I turned to my guide but he was walking, nearly running, up the aisle toward the entrance.

  I opened the door to a large square room with a blackboard at one end nearly covered by a ragged cloth map of the world, hanging unevenly, the kind of map that can be lowered or raised by two cords.

  They must have heard earlier that I was coming to the school. Everyone was smiling, calling my name, nine students and their teacher, Señora García.

  In the fourth grade at P.S. 99, on Long Island, a slam book was handed around the class, a student’s name at the top of each page, below it a blank space where you could write, anonymously, your most damning thoughts. The written names seemed to shiver in the glare and coldness of the cruel judgments below. The slam book had appeared mysteriously in the third or fourth week of October. Someone had written below my name, She stays up all night thinking of things to write and say the next day. I puzzled over the handwriting and the meaning, but of course it was partly true.

  The children in Señora García’s classroom were of different ages, the oldest around twelve, the youngest close to my age. I don’t know how she was able to teach children of such varied ages in one classroom but she managed to do so. At times, still older children turned up in class, only to be absent the next day or the next week. I heard they worked in the cane fields.

  * * *

  I began to be glad that there was no one person looking after me. I soon discovered a way to Señora García’s house. It was a real house, larger than the neighboring houses, or bohíos, as they were called by the families who lived in them. Unlike the Señora’s, the bohíos were raised several feet above the ground on stilts. Underneath them chickens scratched and clucked incessantly.

  The Señora’s kitchen was clean; a doorway was covered with a beaded curtain and led to a second room, where I glimpsed a bed. No one who worked for the plantation had inside lavatories as far as I knew, not even the Garcías, and few had two rooms as they did
.

  The kitchen was a place to meet other children, and we were made welcome by la Señora unless her husband was home. Her kitchen was equipped with a sink and a water tap. She heated water in a kettle on the stove many times over to fill a movable tin tub, where each of us had a bath. After la Señora had put up my hair in paper twists so it would be curly for a few hours, we were ready for our paseo, a walk through the plantation.

  We passed freight cars loaded with cut cane waiting for the engine that drew them to the mill, where the cane was crushed and the resulting liquid boiled in vast iron vats over huge fires. We walked through fields of growing cane until we came to open countryside. On the bank of a small pond surrounded by wild palms and tall straggling grass, a group of boys was gathered. They all had on the big-brimmed straw hats the grown-up men wore. Their voices, their laughter, rang out in the heat-stilled afternoon. They had been let off their work in the cane fields. I knew some of them. I had played baseball with the younger boys four or five times. Their fathers had called me “la ciclón de Olmiguero” and laughed as they said it, but I sensed reproach in their attitude. Yet in time, as the shock wore off of seeing me play baseball, so did the nickname of cyclone. I suppose they forgave me because I was a child and from el norte, as they referred to the United States. I couldn’t be expected to know their rules of conduct.

  I had seen the older boys gathered around that same pond, tossing stones at a flock of tiny white owls sheltering in a palm tree, blinded by daylight. One was hit and fell straight into the pond, a ball of white feathers tinged with blood. “No!” I cried out, but they paid me no attention, except for one who looked at me with a trace of indignation, as though I’d interrupted a ritual.