Borrowed Finery: A Memoir Read online

  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.

  They spoke of shipboard life; about a cave in Ibiza outside of which my father had crouched for hours—embarrassed by a fit of claustrophobia that had paralyzed him not two feet from the entrance, while my mother hid inside along with other refugees—before escaping the next day to the ship that carried them to Marseille; about the fact, ruefully acknowledged by both of them with charming smiles, that no troops from either side especially wanted to capture them; about the demeanor and somewhat hostile behavior of the French in the port; with serio-comic emphasis, they warned us both about the pitfalls of British filmmaking—as though either of us might be about to launch ourselves into it—and such a myriad of subjects that although I stood there motionless and listening ravenously, I felt I was tumbling down a mountainside, an avalanche a few yards behind me.

  Unlike her brother Fermin, my mother had not a trace of a foreign accent, a
lthough as I learned over the next few months, she spoke English with a foreigner’s extreme caution, as though entering an unexplored forest full of dangers. She wanted, I guessed, to speak impeccably, and she would often pause in the middle of a sentence to make a kind of grammar drama. “Is it sort or kind?” “Is it were or was?” “Is it me or I?” she would ask, pondering the perilous choices and looking up at the ceiling as though it might contain the answer.

  Now, in mid-sentence, she switched to Spanish and bent suddenly to embrace my grandmother with nearly human warmth as if she’d all at once recalled that the elderly woman standing so submissively behind her, a stunned smile on her face, was her own mother, who, with her poor grasp of English, would not have understood even a part of what had been said.

  My mother’s eyes stared at me over my grandmother’s shoulder. Her mouth formed a cold radiant smile. My soul shivered.

  My father leaned toward me at that moment, reaching out a hand to push a clump of hair behind my ear. The tips of his fingers were damp. He laughed. He murmured, “Well, pal. Well, well.… Here we all are.”

  * * *

  I had been told by some relative that my father wrote for the movies. During the month that followed their return from Europe, he sold a script to a Hollywood studio for $10,000, a sum beyond my comprehension. It was titled The Last Train from Madrid. When I visited my mother, decades later, a few months before she died, she reported to me with a roguish smile that Graham Greene had said it was “the worst movie I ever saw.” She chuckled—if a Spaniard can ever be said to chuckle.

  After two days, they left the small Manhattan hotel that they had gone to directly from the ship and took a room at the Half-Moon Hotel on the boardwalk at Coney Island, a ramshackle pile at the best of times that burned down long ago.

  My father said they were too “broke” to afford the first hotel. Something about his tone of voice suggested to me that being “broke” was a temporary condition and that it was different from being poor.

  He told me he’d written the entire movie in a week while Elsie, my mother, handed him Benzedrine tablets from the bed upon which she lay, doing crossword puzzles and lighting cigarette after cigarette.

  My grandmother and I visited them there one afternoon. During the hour or so we spent with them, my father presented me with a typewriter, a Hermès baby featherweight, saying, “Don’t hock it, I may want it back.” Only a few days later, he did just that, taking it back with a muttered explanation I couldn’t quite make out.

  During that same visit, he said he had heard about a bequest of $50 made me by “La Señora Ponvert” of Olmiguero. I didn’t look at my grandmother. Who else could have told him? He asked to borrow it, swearing he would repay me—spoken as though we both, he and I, understood that money was nothing; and the old lady leaving it to me, and the amount itself, were trivial matters compared to the larger reality of existence itself; and at this vertiginous moment, my mother spoke from the chair where she was sitting, looking through the pages of a newspaper.

  “Tía Luisa,” she said, without glancing up at me. I had forgotten, not that it was the same person they both had mentioned, but that there had been a bequest. I looked at my grandmother, who was nodding her head rapidly and saying, Yes, yes, in a nearly inaudible voice as though she had been considering that very matter and had arrived at the fortunate conclusion that she and I would make the journey downtown in New York City to the bank where the money was and withdraw it at once.

  When my father sold the movie in a week or so—it was easier in those days, simpler—he didn’t offer either to pay back the fifty dollars or to return the typewriter. And I, feeling that both “loans” would be judged by my parents as trivial, never mentioned them. I hadn’t cared about the money, but I had liked the typewriter.

  Once my father had been paid for the movie, he bought his own father an enormous radio that he had delivered to the house in Yonkers on Warburton Avenue. And he arranged for me to meet Elsie at De Pinna’s department store on Fifth Avenue who would buy me some clothes.

  There was little danger in the subways and the streets in those days. A child was safer, except for the occasional flasher lurking at the dark end of a station platform who might emerge like the spirit of an abandoned cave, exposing his genitals with a glazed look on his face. Yet as I rode into the city from Kew Gardens, I felt an alarm pervading me I couldn’t put a name to.

  I saw Elsie before she saw me. She was moving indolently toward the glove counter close to the store entrance. She looked so isolated yet so complete in herself. It was as though someone using a brushful of black paint had blocked out all the figures walking around her.

  She appeared to sense my presence, or perhaps the presence of a person staring at her intently. She turned toward me as I drew nearer. “Oh. There you are,” she said formally. Her smile was meant for great things.

  The shoe department was on another floor, and I guessed we were to begin there. We went to the elevator, my mother keeping a certain distance between us. From time to time, she glanced at my footwear. I felt ashamed, as though it were I who had made it unfit for her eyes.

  She bought me two pairs of handsome shoes, one black kidskin, the other green suede. During the time we were together, it felt as if we were being continually introduced to each other. I was conscious of an immense strain, as though a large limp animal hung from my neck, its fur impeding my speech.

  Each time, each sentence, I had to start anew. I could hear effort in her voice, too. The whole transaction, selecting, fitting, paying, wrapping, took less than twenty-five minutes. She smiled brilliantly at me in the elevator descending; the smile lasted a few seconds too long.

  “Can you get home by yourself?” she asked me, as though I had suddenly strayed into the path of her vision. I nodded wordlessly. The shopping was over.

  I watched her walk away up Fifth Avenue with her peculiar stride, so characteristic that in the few weeks she’d been back in the United States, I’d learned to imitate it. Half the time she would tiptoe as though she were ready to fly off the earth.

  For years afterward, I thought about that stride of hers, and now and then, when I was alone, I found myself using it as I crossed the floor of the apartment. It was an expression of her strangeness, her singularity—even, if remotely, of her glamour.

  I tried wearing the green suede shoes with Natalie’s green flowered dress, which, as I’d grown taller, fitted me better. But the combination didn’t work. And I had no other clothes to match the elegance of the shoes. They gathered dust in my grandmother’s closet. When I left for good, I left the shoes there too.

  * * *

  My grandmother, given energy and hope by a slight increase in her monthly check from the Ponvert estate—and perhaps by the return of her daughter, perhaps not—found in the same building a larger apartment with a separate bedroom.

  We moved into it along with Uncle Vincent, who appeared at the front door carrying a small suitcase just as we finished putting things away.

  He slept on the studio couch in the living room and, after a few months, departed with no more explanation than he had given upon his arrival.

  He went elsewhere to practice the piano which, I learned years later, he had taught himself to play. He had a telephone installed, so he could be reached for playing engagements to accompany violinists or singers on their way up or down the concert ladder. After he left, it rang only when one or the other of my parents called.

  Vincent had violent nightmares. His screams of terror woke me, piercing my dreams. In the throes of one, he kicked a hole in the thin plaster of the wall just above the couch. The next morning, my grandmother taped over the hole a photograph she had cut from an issue of Life magazine of a melancholy ape sitting on a tree stump in the middle of a shallow lake.

  She had saved it to show to Leopold, who had been living on the East Side of Manhattan in an apartment ever since the Audley Street house was sold. She always strove to please him, to evoke his
laughter. He took an ironic pleasure in all forms of life, especially the simian ones.

  Some Sundays the three unmarried sons, Leopold, Vincent, and Frank, came to have lunch with their mother at a table in the dinette. It was a tight space for even the two of us.

  When my grandmother or I cleared the table, Leopold, warily and wearily, would start a conversation with Vincent, who might suddenly interrupt him with a comment unrelated to the subject. Tension would grow, especially if Frank was away.

  My stomach trouble, diagnosed by the Cuban doctor, would flare up on those Sundays. I’d excuse myself from the table and go to the bedroom I continued to share with my grandmother, clutching my belly, trying to find a position that would give me some relief from the spasms.

  When none of his brothers was present, Leopold would turn up with a young man, slim-waisted, graceful, comely, who would present my grandmother with a bouquet of flowers that smelled strongly of subway stations.

  When only Vincent sat at the round table, he would speak to his mother in a pitiless voice, describing the heavy silverware he had been privileged to use “only last weekend,” at other tables, provided by rich elderly women in whose company, I gathered, he spent much of his time.

  His words were accompanied by grimaces, throat-clearing, low mutters of “Yes … yes,” as though in agreement with himself.

  His scornful glance would fall upon the cheap silverware his mother set beside his plate, and he held up a fork as if it were evidence of a particularly low crime.

  He went soundlessly, abruptly, on errands that were as mysterious to me as they were—I presumed—irresistible to him. I imagined using his suspenders like a slingshot and catapulting him out the door, to land on the black-and-white tiles of the building’s bleak hallway.

  A box arrived shortly after he did, holding a few books. Prominently featured was a return address of the apartment house we lived in. He had sent them to himself, but where had he been when he mailed them?