“Yes? A woman comes?” My brother seemed surprised.
I heard someone in the background call out, “Cuco?”
“A moment, please,” he said. He talked to the voice in Spanish.
I held my breath. I became conscious of my heart beating. I swallowed the welling in my throat. I was sure the voice I heard answer faintly was my father’s.
My brother resumed speaking to me. “Understand,” he said, meaning, I think, not that I should understand, but that he understood. “Abuelo needs help twenty-four hours. He’s,” he lowered his voice as if trying not to be overhead, “forgetting. He doesn’t always know you. Excuse me. I don’t mean you. I mean any person.”
“I understand. Are you looking for a full-time nurse or a home? What kind of care are you—”
“Excuse me,” Cuco interrupted. He spoke to the voice in the background. Again, I remained still, straining to hear. There was a distant groan of irritation. Cuco said, “Wait.”
Immediately, a deep resonant voice took over the line. A voice I had known all my life.
“Rafe, it’s me.” The strength and self-assurance was unmistakable, and also unchanged, as though not a day had passed. “Your grandfather insisted I inform you. We have to find him a nursing home. Goddammit,” he mumbled, not to me, presumably about the situation. “He wants you here,” he resumed in a commanding voice. “Come or not as you like. I don’t give a fuck,” he added casually, without the malice his curse implied. “I promised him I would call. I’ve kept my promise.” I heard the hollow noise of the receiver clatter home to its cradle and the connection died.
I felt for a while that I, not Ma Bell, had been silenced. Mine did last longer. The phone rang — actually it doesn’t ring, it coos like an electronic bird. I answered mechanically and made up some excuse, saying I had to call back, instead of finding out what was wanted. I recovered from the shock by thinking about how to go. Straight to the airport? Not bother to pack, just get on the first plane? Should I tell Diane and let her come along? Would she insist? Should I go at all? I have to admit I was tempted to ignore them. If I pretended they were phantoms perhaps I would be guilty of nothing. I knew myself too well to do that; this was one of the times in my life when I wished I had never read a psychology book.
And yet I did behave as if I had never been analyzed or was capable of self-analysis. I called Julie. I had to look up her office number and it turned out to be wrong anyway. The person who answered told me her new one. I got through the area code and the exchange before stopping. What in God’s name could Julie say that would help?
At least I had come out of my paralysis. I phoned several airlines and booked two tickets on a flight in four hours. That should be enough time to go home, pack, and get to the airport. I went down the hall to catch Diane as one of her sessions ended. First, I told her I had to find a nursing home for Grandpa. She asked how long I thought I would be gone. Then I said that my father was down there. She walked to the receptionist and asked her to cancel our appointments for Friday. I guess I was testing her. She passed.
On the flight I told her stories of Tampa. What she knew of my childhood was really the big picture, the lurid highlights, but it wasn’t those things that lived in my head. I ended up talking mostly about Grandmother Jacinta’s indulgences of me: making grilled cheese sandwiches at ten o’clock at night, storing up natillas in the refrigerator, watching me through the screen door while I played on the street, calling out that I should come in for lemonade. I could feel the cool hand of her palm on my forehead as I sat at her yellow Formica table and gulped the drink. I was moved by the memories. Diane held my hand. I stayed quiet after that, surprised by the spreading lights of Tampa at night. I didn’t remember the city being so big. I mentioned that to Diane. She surprised me by saying that she’d read in the Times it was one of the fastest growing cities in America. The airport was certainly large, as if they expected millions to arrive. In fact it was eerily deserted.
When I gave the address to the cab driver, he picked up a book of city street maps, looked in an index, then flipped to a brightly colored page. He said, “What was that address?”
I told him again. “Sixteen fifty-three St. Claire Street.”
“You sure you got the right address?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s not a hotel. There are no hotels there.”
“No. We’re staying in a house.”
He looked in the rearview mirror at me. “You been there before?”
“What’s the problem?” Diane asked me.
“It’s the right address,” I said to him and continued to Diane in a normal tone, so the driver could hear, “Since the area is mostly black he’s assuming I’ve got the wrong address. It used to be a very poor, but respectable Latin working-class neighborhood. Now it’s crack heaven. And worse,” I added, “the spies have moved out and the niggers have moved in.”
The driver pulled away from the curb, but he glanced at me in the mirror, checking whether I was being sarcastic. I showed nothing. “Is it safe for your grandfather to live there?” Diane asked.
“He’s lived there for seventy years. I couldn’t get him to move.”
“That’s a shame,” the driver said. “So Grandpa’s stuck with the house. Probably can’t sell it.”
“Probably not,” I agreed.
“You never said anything about that,” Diane commented. It sounded like a complaint to me. “Weren’t you worried about an old man living in a neighborhood like that?”
“Who me? You know I never worry about anything.” She didn’t laugh. “He told me once he would rather be dead than move. I thought that closed the subject.”
She peered at me, squinting at the flashing lights of passing cars, saying nothing, waiting as if my answer wasn’t satisfactory.
“His politics,” I said softly. “Remember their politics? ‘Rise with your class,’” I quoted, “‘not out of it.’ He would never move.”
She looked away, at the window on her side. “I guess it’s hard to leave a place you’ve lived in your whole life,” she commented. I was annoyed. That was a shrink talking: arguing with my understanding of my world.
“His closest friend left about twenty-five years ago,” I said, “when the first blacks moved to St. Claire Street. So did all the cousins of my generation. They moved to nice middle-class neighborhoods. If he’d gone with them he’d have familiar people and things around him. It’s not so clear that staying was timidity on his part. When his block was integrated, the black families who moved in were respectable working-class people. Grandpa was the first Latin to knock on their doors and invite them over. He’s still good friends with the family next door. In fact, they keep an eye on him. They’re not any happier than he is about what crack has done to the neighborhood. I know it’s hard for those of us who live in New York to remember, Diane, but there are people who act out of principle, rather than neurosis.”
Diane put her hand on my leg and rubbed. “Take it easy,” she said in a whisper.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
We both watched the streets as we neared Pepín’s house. Whores patrolled the avenue where I had once stopped at the Dairy Queen for a Brown Bonnet. There was a racial joke somewhere in there — Brown Bonnets of some kind were still for sale. On my grandfather’s street most of the houses and tiny lawns were well-kept. But there were bars on the windows and no one on the porches. On a humid spring night they used to be full of people gossiping and arguing politics, calling across to each other, their kids strolling to a now abandoned store on the corner for candy. Our driver was nervous when he had to stop at the light on Nebraska to make the turn onto St. Claire. Eyes checking and rechecking his side and rearview mirrors, he crept forward gradually so he was virtually through before it went green. I gave him a big tip. Some cabbies would have refused to take us.