“I want you to play by yourself one more minute, sweet-heart,” Dolores said firmly, taking the purse.
“Why is Mommy crying?”
“Because I’m sad about something.”
“Why?” answered Maria with a small pout, running her finger along the cast-iron ivy vine of Dolores’s chair.
“Because sometimes things are very sad.”
“Why?” came the plaintive voice, wanting to know of the adult things being discussed.
“Jack and I have to talk about something now, mi’ja.”
“Why?”
“Please, Maria.”
The child wandered obediently toward the flowers, and when it was clear that her daughter’s attention was diverted, Dolores drew from the purse a thick sheaf of odd-sized papers held together by several rubber bands. “She doesn’t remember her brother. She was only a year old,” Dolores noted sadly. She pulled off the bands and quietly paged through the papers until she drew out what looked like a worn pamphlet. She opened it and considered its contents, then quietly handed it to me. “I don’t know why I kept this, but I did.”
The pamphlet, printed under the name of James McGaffey & Son, Inc., Funeral Directors, of Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn, was a general price list for the services to the dead. The prices “include the local transfer of remains to the funeral home, staff services, securing of necessary authorizations, basic local transportation to the crematory or cemetery . . .” I looked up at Dolores, then back at the pamphlet, skimming the words in sickened recognition at the costly procedures of attending to the dead. I had studied much the same document when choosing Liz’s burial arrangements: “If you want to arrange a direct cremation, you may use an unfinished wooden box or an alternative container. Alternative containers can be made of heavy material, pressed wood or composition materials, or may be pouches of canvas or other materials.” And there followed the many prices for the various services, and a few of these had small check marks next to them in pencil, no doubt made by Dolores: “Embalming (including use of the preparation room): $450.00” and “Embalming of autopsied remains: $490.00”; “Topical disinfection: $375.00”; “Dressing and Casketing: $90.00” and “Cosmetology: $45.00”; “Surgical restoration: $52.00”; and “Crucifix: $75.00.”
I handed the pamphlet back.
“We buried him in Green-Wood Cemetery,” Dolores whispered. “I used to think it was nice, with all those big maple trees, but then you see on Twenty-fifth Street that’s where all the stripped cars get left. And people just dump their garbage there, you know, old washing machines and broken televisions and stuff. Mattresses and stuff. I don’t want that for my little Hector. If I could do anything I would take him to the little place where my father is buried in the Dominican Republic, a very tiny church in the town where my father was born, it’s the most beautiful graveyard I ever saw, where they got flowers growing on the fence and you can smell the sea. I wanted him to be safe, next to my father, not jammed in with a fucking million other people.”
“So,” I ventured carefully, “that night you went out to the cemetery it was your son’s grave you were visiting, not your father’s?”
Dolores looked at me and I forgave her deception. She nodded. “Yes, Jack.”
We sat there in the late light of the day and heard the scrape of a fork on china and laughter tinkling across the space of the other yards. An early summer dinner party perhaps, several houses down, the polite and witty chatter that had echoed along the back walls of these Victorian brown-stones for more than a hundred years. The voices rose and fell. They were discussing national politics, the latest movies, the delicacies of a certain new restaurant on the West Side. Maria was kneeling at the edge of the garden, watching a bee crawl into the pink, scalloped trumpet of a petunia. The sun burned low on the brick walls and through the season’s first purple morning glory blossoms along the fence. Dolores folded the papers back into her purse. She leaned forward and I saw great exhaustion in her eyes. She took my hand with a strong grip.
“You see why I couldn’t tell you everything real fast, Jack? It would have been too much. Honestly, I just couldn’t tell you because it’s so sad for me, it was the thing that made it bad between us forever and it wasn’t even Hector’s fault . . . and after little Hector got killed Hector was so protective, he used to yell at me to be careful with Maria, when she was in the stroller, when we were crossing the street, every little thing. He was so upset about what happened to Hector that he got so, you know, unreasonable. We used to go to St. Michael’s on Fifth Avenue, that’s where everybody who goes to mass in the neighborhood goes. Hector always said it looked like the plaster ceiling was going to come down but I liked it, it was very big. But I think he confessed to Father Baptiste how our son died, and he must have said something that changed Hector. I asked him what did Father Baptiste say but he never told me. I’m sure he told the priest. It didn’t bother me, because it’s between Hector and God. He needed to tell it.”
She nodded to herself and watched Maria lifting a scoop of sand into the air. “After that, Hector was so serious when we went to confession. He polished his shoes. And he would stay in the booth a long time and people began to look at me, like, what is your husband doing in there, what did he do so he’s gotta be in the booth so long? I knew he was telling the priest, I knew he said everything, about how he had sex so loud that it scared our little boy. And I think Father Baptiste said something to Hector about protecting Maria, maybe that God would not forgive him the death of two children at his own hand. That because of little Hector, we must be vigilant. Me, I didn’t say anything about it to Father Baptiste when I went inside, for months, even after Maria was born. I was too afraid about what he would say, you know, that he would open the door and yell to everyone that I was a sex maniac and had killed my son. And I just knew that Father Baptiste was waiting for me, every Sunday I said all my little sins and he told me how many rosaries and then asked me if that was all, if there was anything else I wished to confess and I almost said it but Maria was making a little bit of noise and was hungry so I said no. I guess that’s just an excuse.
“But Hector was so serious and used to tell me to watch out for drug dealers because they were all over the neighborhood, these guys who were very tough, and watch out for everybody. Some guys had got beat up real bad around the corner, one of them got a screwdriver in the liver somebody said, and people’s cars were getting stolen and all the usual stuff. The lady next door got broken into and they stole her VCR and television. Hector went to the hardware store and bought one of those peep holes and drilled a hole in our front door and put it in. And he said that little Hector’s death was a test and he had failed it and that sooner or later another test would come. He never said what the test would be but he said that when it came he was going to be ready. He said God watched us all and I guess I agree with that, because that’s what we’re always taught, but I wondered what happened to the old happy Hector, like where was he? Now everything was so serious. If I did anything, like I forgot to look at the light before it changed, he got so angry with me, squeezing my arm hard and pulling me back and saying that he didn’t want Maria killed just like her brother just because . . . and he always meant it was my fault, you know. And he wanted to have another baby, another son.”
“That’s understandable,” I said. “I’d want to do that.”
Dolores smiled sadly. “We did it all the time, every night just about, and I didn’t get pregnant. I don’t know why. Maybe I was too worried. And we did it at the right time of the month and all.
“And—he used to fuck me with a sort of—he was quiet now, sometimes he’d pray before . . . before, he used to make a lot of noise and sweat and swear and tell me I was a good lay and stick his tongue in my ear but now it was just, like, climb on and do it and wait to get pregnant. I couldn’t even tell if he liked it. I mean he was, you know, he had no trouble getting an erection but he always . . . I think he still loved me but—but he didn’t care
so much about getting rich but now he hated people who were rich because they stole from the poor. He had these ideas from the Bible . . . he still went to work and everything, Hector never missed work putting in the cable everywhere and selling cars. He could still mess around and make people laugh, you know out on the street with his old friends and everybody, but inside he was different.
“And I started doing some things . . . I liked this guy, Sal, who was the super’s son, younger, you know, maybe twenty one or-two and he used to come around after lunch when Maria was down for her nap. We started messing around a little bit, and then it got sort of regular. I made him use rubbers because I was trying to get pregnant with Hector. I couldn’t, like, have a diaphragm lying around. I always took a shower and told Sal to leave right away. Maybe just once a week. I felt so bad about it but I just, I had to feel like—all of me was still there. Sal didn’t tell anybody, he was very smart because he’d seen Hector, he knew Hector was so jealous. I didn’t even like Sal so much. He was just sweet and sort of young . . . I had to actually, like, teach him some things in bed. He reminded me of when Hector was younger, he didn’t even have much hair on his chest or stomach. He was very glad, you know, like a boy. He made me feel good. But I knew it was wrong. I told Ruita what I was doing and she told me I had to get out of the marriage . . . she said she’d give me the money to get out if that was what I wanted to do. She said everybody in the building was talking about Hector, like they expected him to do something weird like jump off a roof or something. She said sooner or later something would go wrong and Hector would find out about Sal and then he would kill me or Sal or the baby or somebody. He hated his job with the cable. But there wasn’t any other work. And I felt bad I was taking his money and sleeping with Sal.”
Dolores inspected her hands, as if her guilt were stained on them. “But I was trying. Hector said he wanted to go to St. Patrick’s in Manhattan and pray for little Hector and I said okay and I left the baby with Ruita and we did it, the place is so so big and you have all the tourists there and I thought that maybe Hector would feel better and it seemed like he did, he seemed like himself a little bit more, but after that, he was just depressed. He got older, I used to look at him when he didn’t know it and I could see his eyes were older. You know, sadder. And he started to drink more, he didn’t just drink on Sunday when all the guys watched football. One night he came home real late and smelled real bad and I asked him where he’d been and he told me he went up to the top of the Empire State Building and just stood up there. And I knew he’d been drinking up there and that scared me bad. I knew he was thinking about killing himself. I just sort of knew. Up there real high with the lights of the city and I remember how windy it gets and it means he was thinking . . . he never came out and said it . . .
“One night I was by myself for once, and I passed by a restaurant window, a coffee shop really, and I saw this woman sitting there in the booth, by herself. She was about my age, maybe twenty-eight, and she was smoking a cigarette and seemed, like, at peace. Like after mass, when you just sit there by yourself. Like she just knew who she was and what she was doing and wasn’t in a rush. And it wasn’t like she was rich, like she had a lot of money, right? She just was herself, all herself and I stared at her. I stopped at the window and it was like I was looking at what I wanted to be.
“And so I decided that night I would tell Hector I was leaving. I would tell him it wasn’t his fault but I had to go. We were done. I loved him so much but we were done. I figured I could borrow a couple of thousand from Ruita. She understood, like I said. I knew I had to go somewhere Hector couldn’t find me. I didn’t want him to find me, I wanted it to be so that he could maybe forget, and feel better after enough time went by. It couldn’t be in Sunset Park. And even though Brooklyn is cheaper than Manhattan I was afraid he would find me in Brooklyn. And I never went to Queens really. I just got that feeling. I figured I’d just find a job doing something. I mean, even though the economy is bad, I could do something and make it. I didn’t need anything as long as I had everything for Maria. All I wanted was for her to have a chance for a better life. I didn’t want her to have Hector for a father. She loved him but she didn’t know anything. Something was dead in him, you know? He had no pride. My father had pride, even though he was a working man. He wore a clean shirt every day, he had no debts, he lived clean. I wanted Maria to have a father like that. Hector was . . . his spirit was, like, dying. He was getting so strange, so angry and ridiculous. Did I say that he went to mass on Sundays twice?
“So I was going to tell him that night. But I didn’t. He came home and had worked all day and was tired and ate dinner and fell asleep. Then I realized that if I told him we’d just have a big fight. And he would try to stop me, so I didn’t tell him. He went to work the next day, just like usual and I packed two big suitcases and took Maria in the stroller to the subway, the B train. I didn’t even leave him a note. Maybe I didn’t believe I was going to do it. But then I was doing it, it was happening, we were actually leaving and I had all my papers with me, everything important like Maria’s birth certificate, I got that in my purse, too, and I had the money from Ruita, she gave it to me, like I said she would, and as soon as I got on the train I felt better, like I was moving again, like I was going to make it, the old me coming back. I knew Maria was going to miss her daddy but that she would get over it. She was still young enough. I had some good clothes and some makeup and I could look good if I needed to. I knew men would look at me. But I wasn’t looking for a man, I just wanted to find a room somewhere where Hector couldn’t find me and start getting a job, you know. When I got into Manhattan, some of the businessmen, like you, looked at me. One man asked me could he buy me a drink. Some older guy, in his fifties.
“I went to that hotel where you found me. I had maybe three thousand dollars and I just wanted to hide for a few days. I guess I was upset about it but I had nobody to talk to. And Maria asked me when were we going home and that—that was hard because I had to tell her that we were living away from Daddy now. I didn’t call Hector at first. I knew he was going crazy and I didn’t even call Ruita. I just took Maria for walks and read the newspaper and lived for a few days. And maybe about the third night I came back and my door was open and somebody had gone through the room. I had put the money in the pages of this magazine where nobody would see it but they found that. They took almost all my money and I had maybe two hundred dollars left in my pocketbook and—see, this made me think it was a woman—they took a lot of my clothes, all my good clothes and they took Maria’s clothes too. I was sick. I was so upset. To take a little girl’s clothes. I was so worried because I couldn’t go back to Hector, not now. I had to go up to a Hundred Twenty-fifth Street in Harlem to buy some more clothes for us and I think I spent something like forty dollars. I was running out of money. Food is so expensive. I called Ruita, maybe to see if she could give me a few hundred more but Lucy her sister answered and said Hector was looking for me, that he was going crazy and asking everybody if they knew where I was. Then I knew I couldn’t go back. And that night I went to the clothing store to see if I could get some shoes for Maria. I was saving a pair that little Hector used to have because I knew her feet were getting bigger and his shoes weren’t worn out, babies don’t wear out shoes, they outgrow them, but those shoes got stolen too. And I knew Maria’s toes were rubbing inside, it was too tight, and I went to a couple of stores up there looking to buy a secondhand pair, maybe four or five dollars because the new ones, even the cheap ones, cost at least twenty dollars. It was late and I couldn’t find the right shoes and I got back on the number two train at Ninety-sixth Street and that was when you stood up and talked to me.
“I didn’t know what to do. I looked at you and I guessed I figured I would take a chance. You were my chance and I would take it. I knew you liked the way I looked because you were so nervous. I was in this old coat and got maybe sixty or seventy dollars and you were in that very good suit and tie—I knew
it was real silk—and came from this whole different world, you know, I could see that right away, and had a lot of money, and you were so nervous. I mean, Jack, I never thought I was going to end up living in your house or that we would go to bed together or anything like that! I couldn’t think so far ahead. All I knew is that you stood up and gave me your card and that was something. I had something, I had this little card, you know? You remember I looked at you after the doors shut? I was sort of scared, I kind of knew something might happen. And that night I decided to come see you.”
“What about your eye?” I interrupted.
“My eye?”
“Remember? You had a terrible black eye that you said Hector gave—”
“Oh right. Yeah. No, he didn’t give it to me.”
“I thought he did it.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“He didn’t hit you?”
“I didn’t even see him that night.”
This amazed me. “Then how?”
Dolores looked down. “I started thinking that night about how maybe I would go see you and then I thought maybe some other businessmen might, like, you know, be interested. And when Maria was asleep I went downstairs at the hotel and I thought maybe I would just go out. There’s all these little restaurants and all those people who go to the theater . . .”
“You were looking to pick up some rich guy maybe? I’d given you the idea?”
“Basically. I don’t know. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t know what to do. I went in one or two places but they looked at my clothes and they told me to leave. So I started walking around, you know, just thinking about everything, I think I was like on Eighth Avenue, maybe Forty-fourth Street, Forty-fifth, I didn’t know the neighborhood, really, and I saw some limousines and I started walking in that direction thinking maybe there was some other restaurant and then all of a sudden this big woman comes running across the street, she’s got this tight little skirt, but she is big, and she comes right up to me and punches me right in the eye and starts screaming at me to get the fuck out of her ‘point.’ And I don’t what she means, my eye hurts so much—”
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