Bruno and Lily had moved to a new house since Roy had last seen them, which had been at the funeral of Grandpa Joseph, his dad and Bruno’s father, five years before, when Roy was fourteen. Roy’s uncle and aunt had not made an effort to keep in touch with him since his dad died, two years before the death of Grandpa Joseph. Roy had been living in Europe for the last two years and was visiting his mother in Chicago before continuing on to the West Coast. He decided to stop by Bruno and Lily’s just to say hello and see their house. He had always liked his aunt Lily, a lively, attractive woman who at one time had been quite friendly with his mother, even after his parents divorced. “Give my best to Lily,” Roy’s mother said to him.
Bruno was another story, as were Roy’s cousins Daria and Delilah. Daria was a year younger than Roy and Delilah five years younger. Ever since Roy could remember both Daria and her father seemed always to be in a bad mood, and Delilah uncommunicative, keeping very much to herself. Roy’s mother told him that his Uncle Bruno had wanted sons, not daughters, and made his feelings obvious in his behavior toward Daria and Delilah; he remained cold and distant, leaving Lily with the responsibility of raising them. Besides this and catering to her husband, Lily devoted much of her time to work on behalf of Mother Wolfram’s Mission for the Misshapen and other charitable organizations.
When his uncle answered the front door, he did so by peering through a narrow slit. Not recognizing Roy, he asked who he was. Roy identified himself, which caused Bruno to pause for several seconds before informing him that there were too many locks to undo on the door and instructing him to come around the side of the house where he would be admitted through the servants’ entrance.
It was Lily who admitted him. She smiled and seemed pleased to see Roy. His aunt had worn heavy pancake makeup ever since he’d known her and dark red, precisely applied lipstick so Roy was not surprised when she air-kissed him on both sides of his face. Lily guided Roy up a winding staircase and through an enormous kitchen into a den that he could see connected to a livingroom. Daria and Delilah, she informed him, were away at boarding school in the East. Bruno was sitting in a high-backed chair and motioned with his right index finger for Roy to sit in an armchair across from him.
“Is your mother still alive?” Lily asked.
“She is,” said Roy.
“Say hello to her for me,” his aunt said, then left the room.
Roy looked around. There were paintings on the walls of older men in suits, none of whom Roy recognized.
“What do you want?” asked Bruno.
Roy’s father’s only brother was a large man, a couple of inches over six feet tall and he weighed in excess of 220 pounds. Bruno wore his pants fastened just below his chest, a blue dress shirt and dark brown tie; he had a bushy mustache and a full head of gray-brown hair that stood up like a stiff brush.
“I came to say hello to you and Aunt Lily,” said Roy. “I’ve been living abroad for two years.”
“Do you plan to stay in Chicago now?”
“No, I’m on my way to California.”
Bruno was an auctioneer; he handled sales of restaurants, automobile dealerships, private estates and business properties. Roy recalled his mother once commenting that Bruno could for the right price acquire anything anyone wanted. He was Roy’s father’s older brother by four years but he seemed to Roy to belong to an earlier time, a Biblical epoch when kings ruled unchallenged. Bruno scrutinized his nephew as if Roy were a freak in a carnival.
“I can have the maid make you a sandwich if you’re hungry,” he said.
Roy shook his head. “Who are the men in these paintings?”
“Mules in the wilderness, ones who survived.”
Roy and his uncle sat in silence until Roy stood up.
“Use the servants’ door,” said Bruno.
When Roy returned to his mother’s house she asked him if he’d seen Bruno and Lily.
“Lily says hello. She wasn’t sure you were still alive.”
“Does she still look the same?”
“Like a Kabuki actress,” said Roy. “She still wears more makeup than Lon Chaney.”
“What did Bruno have to say?”
“He asked me what I wanted.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“Nothing. We didn’t talk much. He asked me if I was hungry. He said the maid could make me a sandwich.”
Roy’s mother was sitting on a couch in the livingroom. Roy sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the coffee table.
“You know that was my father’s favorite chair,” she said.
“I remember Pops sitting in it in the afternoons reading the Daily News when I came home from school. I sat on the floor next to him and he read to me from the sports section.”
Rain streaked the windows behind Roy’s mother.
“Looks like I got home just in time,” he said.
“When your father died he didn’t leave a will. Intestate, it’s called. He left Bruno in charge of all of his affairs, but he told me you would be taken care of. Bruno said your dad didn’t have anything to leave, that he had to pay off his brother’s debts and there was nothing left for you. My brother knew Bruno was lying and so did I. Your dad kept money in safe deposit boxes in hotels and God knows where else. He didn’t want the government to know what he had and he never trusted the banks. Your Uncle Buck talked to Bruno about it but there was nothing he could do. If your dad left a will my guess is that Bruno burned it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“You were twelve years old, there wasn’t any point. What was done was done.”
“He acted like I’d come there to kill him.”
Roy’s mother gave a little laugh. “Bruno was afraid of you, that you knew he’d stolen whatever your father had.”
“Did Aunt Lily know?”
“Bruno never told her anything about his business.”
A year after Roy saw his uncle, Bruno died. In a letter Roy’s mother told him an article in the Chicago Tribune said the police suspected foul play, that Bruno had been poisoned and that Daria and Delilah were being held in protective custody on suspicion of murdering their father. In her next letter Roy’s mother enclosed a newspaper clipping featuring a photograph of Lily that said she had committed suicide by ingesting an overdose of sleeping pills and that she had left a note confessing that she, not her daughters, had poisoned her husband. Her estate, she instructed, should be divided equally between her children and Mother Wolfram’s Mission for the Misshapen.
In her second letter Roy’s mother wrote, “Your dad told me that when he was four years old and Bruno was eight, Bruno hammered a nail through one of his fingers into a piece of wood on purpose to test himself to see if he could do it and not cry. I asked your dad if Bruno cried and he said yes but that his brother promised him if he told anyone he would nail your father’s fingers to a tree.”
The Boy Whose Mother May Have
Married a Leopard
When he was eight years old Roy had a dream in which his mother, who in real life had already been married three times, came home one day with a leopard and told Roy that the leopard was her new husband. The leopard was very big and he was not tawny but black with even darker spots that could be seen only if a person looked closely at his skin.
“How could you marry a leopard, Mom?” Roy asked. “I didn’t know that human beings and animals could marry each other.”
In the dream Roy’s mother did not answer his question. The following morning when he told her his dream she laughed and said, “I may have married a leopard when I was younger, before you were born. I can’t remember, my memory’s not so good about those things.”
“You’d remember if you married a leopard.”
“Did I have him on a leash?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Figur
es.” she said.
Walking to school Roy told his friend Jimmy Boyle about his dream and Jimmy said, “Nobody would ever pick on a kid if they knew his old man was a leopard.”
Roy did not like the men his mother married. His real father had died when Roy was three years old, so he had not really known him, but Roy convinced himself that these other husbands were different. Maybe, he thought, the leopard in the dream was how he wanted his real father to have been, powerful and beautiful, someone who would always be there to protect him.
A few days later Roy’s mother’s friend Kay, who wore a lot of make-up and whose bright red lipstick was always slightly smeared, said to him, “Kitty told me you had a dream that she’d married a wild beast.”
“A leopard,” said Roy.
“It was a symbol,” Kay said.
“What’s that?”
“Something that represents something else, like a desire or a feeling you didn’t know you had. I’ve got lots of repressed desires. My doctor says it’s why my skin breaks out.”
“Don’t confuse him, Kay,” said Roy’s mother.
Kay was holding a lit cigarette in her right hand; she ran the fingers of her left hand through Roy’s hair.
“Your father had thick dark hair like yours,” she said.
Roy saw an old black and white movie on TV in which a black leopard escapes from a zoo and turns into a woman who gets hit by a car and dies but before she does she turns back into a leopard. He told Jimmy Boyle about it and Jimmy asked him if he ever had the dream again about his mother marrying a leopard.
Roy shook his head. “No, it probably got run over, too.”
A few months later Roy overheard his mother telling someone on the telephone that Kay had divorced her husband and married one of his mother’s ex-husbands, but that had not worked out so Kay was going to divorce him, too. Not long after this Roy came home and found Kay and his mother sitting in the livingroom drinking highballs, smoking cigarettes and talking.
“Hello, Roy,” said Kay, “how nice to see you. What are you doing with yourself these days? “
“Playing baseball and going to school. What are you doing?”
Kay puffed on her cigarette. Her lipstick was smeared more than usual.
“Waiting for you to grow up,” she said.
Stung
When Roy’s mother swam into a bevy of jellyfish and got stung by them he was walking along the beach smashing men-of-war with a board. He liked hearing them pop and seeing their blue ink spurt onto the white sand. Roy took care to stand a couple of feet away from the cephalopods, not wanting to step on their invisible poisonous tentacles. He heard his mother’s screams and saw her walking unsteadily out of the ocean. She was crying and two teen-age girls who were sunbathing on the beach got up and ran over to her. Roy dropped the board and ran over, too.
“It was terrible,” his mother said, sobbing between words. “I was swimming close to shore and all of a sudden I was surrounded by jellyfish. They stuck to my back and I couldn’t get away from them. They kept stinging me.”
“Jesus, lady, your back is full of wounds, your shoulders, too,” said one of the girls. “You should see a doctor right away.”
“They’re hairs,” said the other girl. “The stingers are actually hairs that grow out of their tentacles. I learned it in biology.”
Roy and his mother were in Miami Beach, staying at the Delmonico Hotel, waiting for his father to come over on the ferry from Havana. Roy knew that his parents were getting a divorce but he didn’t know exactly what it meant. He understood that his father would not be living with him and his mother any more, but his dad had seldom been with them in the past few months anyway, so Roy didn’t think that would make much of a difference.
At the doctor’s office, Roy was made to sit in the waiting room while his mother was being attended to. A receptionist asked him how old he was and when he told her five but almost six she gave him six Tootsie Rolls. Roy didn’t like Tootsie Rolls but he took them from her anyway, said thank you, and stuffed them in the right hand pocket of his silver-blue Havana Kings jacket.
Later, Roy decided, he would distribute them to the bus boys at the Delmonico. Roy had gotten to know them well during the five weeks he and his mother had been there. They had all been nice to him—especially Leo, Chi Chi, Chico and Alberto—giving him dishes of ice cream and Coca-Colas while he hung out in the hotel kitchen and talked to them about baseball. They were all Cubans and Roy often went to the Sugar Kings games with his father when he was in Havana. In December, Roy’s father had introduced him to El Vaquero, “The Cowboy,” the Cuban League home run champion who had for many years played third base for the Cienfuegos team. El Vaquero, whose real name was Raimundo Pardo, had recently had “una taza de café” with the Washington Senators, but he’d struck out much more often than he’d hit home runs for them so the Senators had cut him loose. El Vaquero was going to play now for the Sugar Kings. Roy was looking forward to seeing him hit home runs out of Gran Stadium, but when he told this to Chico and Leo they laughed and said El Vaquero was too old, that his nickname should be changed to El Viejo, “The Old Guy.”
“What did the doctor do, Mom?” Roy asked when they were in a taxi going back to the hotel.
“He washed and disinfected the places where I was stung and then applied ointment to them. He said they’ll take a few days to heal. You’ll rub the ointment on my back for me at night, won’t you, Roy?”
“Sure, if you want me to. But I go to sleep before you do. When Dad gets here, he can do it if I’m already in bed.”
Roy’s mother looked out the cab’s window on her side. The sidewalks were very crowded and the taxi couldn’t go fast because a wagon filled with plantains being pulled by a horse was in front of it.
“Don’t talk about your dad,” she said. “Not right now.”
“Why, Mom? He’s coming to Miami, isn’t he?”
“It hurts, Roy. I didn’t think it would, but it does.”
“Don’t worry, Mom, they’re just jellyfish stings. You’ll be okay in a few days.”
El almuerzo por poco
The girl was sitting at a corner table next to a window, gently knocking ash from her cigarette into an empty cup. The café was crowded due to the rain; nobody wanted to leave until it stopped or at least let up a bit. Customers were standing, holding cups and saucers and plates in their hands, ready to pounce if a table became free. She didn’t want to give up hers, even though she had finished her coffee.
Roy was with his mother having a quick lunch before her appointment at the dermatologist’s. After both of them had ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and coconut milkshakes, Roy’s mother told him that she had to make a phone call. He had noticed the girl in the corner as soon as they’d sat down and now could hardly take his eyes off of her. She was about seventeen or eighteen, Roy guessed. Her thick black hair fell over one eye but he thought she looked a lot like Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Suddenly, Last Summer, which he’d seen the day before with his mother. Roy was twelve years old and a sign at the theater had said No Minors Allowed but his mother had bought two tickets anyway and nobody tried to stop him from going in with her. After they’d taken their seats, Roy whispered to his mother that children weren’t supposed to see the movie.
“It’s a matinee, Roy,” she whispered back to him. The theater’s not even half full. They’re just glad to sell tickets.”
When the girl at the corner table leaned back in her chair and brushed the hair off of her face, Roy felt a little flutter in his stomach. She had almost the identical expression as Elizabeth Taylor had when she was telling the story of how the desperately poor and starving kids on the beach had devoured Montgomery Clift.
The grilled cheese sandwiches and coconut milkshakes arrived before Roy’s mother returned but Roy ignored the food and continued to stare at the girl. The café was i
n Little Havana, on Southwest 8th Street, close to the dermatologist’s office. Roy had been there twice before and he and his mother always ordered the same thing. Everyone in the café, which was named La Cafetería Fabuloso, was speaking Spanish, so Roy assumed the beautiful girl was Cuban, like most of the people in this part of Miami. He wondered why she was alone and imagined she worked in a shop somewhere in the barrio.
His mother came back and said, “Oh, good, I’m starved. Aren’t you, Roy? I couldn’t get Margie to stop complaining about Ronaldo. I told her to just tell him to go back to his wife.”
Roy took a sip of his milkshake through the straw in the glass and thought about those wild boys biting into Monty Clift’s flesh. Elizabeth Taylor told the psychiatrist, or Katherine Hepburn, who played Montgomery Clift’s mother, Roy couldn’t remember who, how there had been nothing she could do to stop them.
“Come on, Roy, we don’t have much time.”
The girl stood up. She was taller than Roy expected her to be, and slender, not short and buxom like Elizabeth Taylor. She still had a terrified expression on her face, as if she expected something bad to happen to her as soon as she left the café.
“I’m glad it’s raining today,” said Roy’s mother. “Too much sun makes me want to wriggle out of my skin like a snake.”
Roy watched the girl walk out. She was wearing a pink cotton dress and did not carry an umbrella. Roy wanted to get up and follow her.
“We’re late, Roy. If you’re not hungry now, wrap up your sandwich in a napkin and we’ll take it with us. You can eat it at the dermatologist’s.”
Vultures
“In Africa, some tribes believe that wearing a freshly decapitated vulture head can give a person the ability to see into the future.”
Roy was sitting on a bench against a wall in Henry Armstrong’s second floor boxing gym in Miami listening to Derondo Simmons, a former middleweight once ranked number five in the world by Ring magazine. Derondo was forty-two years old and worked as a sparring partner for up-and-comers. Mostly he hung around Henry’s and talked to whoever would listen. He was a great storyteller and a voracious reader, especially in the areas of ancient history and anthropology. Roy, who was nine, was a willing audience for Derondo’s lectures, and Derondo appreciated it.
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