My mother dropped her arm around my shoulder. Her hand snaked around to my cheek and softly, but insistently, pulled the skin taut, distorting my mouth. “He lies a lot,” she said to Mr. Stein. Her tone was loving, not critical or disappointed. Her fingertips tugged at my cheek. I could easily have spoken despite their spidery hold on my face, but they communicated her wish that I keep quiet. “He’s very imaginative. I’m afraid my whole family is. I used to tell lies all the time. Fantastic lies. They were really my way of making myself more interesting. He’s probably told you all kinds of things about why his father is away. He misses him and I think he may be a little bit angry, so he makes up stories about why his Daddy can’t come home. The truth is he’s a reporter for the New York Times. He’s on assignment in Latin America, and he’s constantly moving around so there’s no point in our joining him down there. We don’t know when we’ll see him next. It’s hard on Rafe.”
“That’s not—!” I wanted to explain that it had nothing to do with all the secrets I wasn’t supposed to tell, about my father being in Cuba, Mom and Dad being Communists or the rest. But her web of fingers tugged a warning and I shut up before she interrupted me.
“That’s not what you were lying about this time?” she said, again with no hint of anger, in a sweet understanding tone.
Mr. Stein, back to his mouse-like squeak, finally spoke. “He told us a long involved — a whole thing about a softball tournament in school. Supposedly he’s the captain and he wanted Joseph to play. He was going to take him all over the city … supposedly to these baseball games.”
“I see.” Ruth pushed me away from her. “Go to your room. Go straight to your room. Don’t go poking around looking for your toys. Go straight to your room, shut the door and stay there until I come in. Go!”
I went. I heard the start of her apology to Mr. Stein.
“There’s probably some truth to it, but of course it’s a lie. You’ll have to forgive him—”
As I passed, I noticed that the door to her bedroom was closed. That was unusual. I didn’t think about it. I was enraged. I slammed my own door shut and hurled myself onto the bed. I pressed my face into the pillow. Wild anger pulsed in my head, the kind that makes you feel will explode your skin and scatter your character into unrecoverable bits.
Worse than the fury, however, was my confusion. Why had she done this? Why had she told such a diabolical lie, a lie that left my character in ruins? She had heard from Mr. Stein himself that his worries had nothing to do with Dad or Cuba and yet she had made me into a living paradox, someone who would be believed less and less the more he told the truth. I was in quicksand; my end would only be hastened by resistance. How could I free myself from what Mr. Stein would tell Joseph and, by extension, every friend of mine, their parents and finally (Washington Heights was a small town in this respect) my teachers? Even the candy store man who sold me baseball cards, Milky Ways, and Pinkies would hear of it eventually. I would be Rafe the liar to them all.
I couldn’t stand it. Longing for justice, I opened my door and walked out. My bedroom was the third in line off a narrow hall. A small bedroom, which my father used as a study, lay between my room and the master bedroom. All three shared a bathroom at my end of the hall. A strong smell of paint lingered in the windowless passageway. I took one step out of my room and stopped. I didn’t proceed into the living room and foyer to confront my mother and Mr. Stein because a strange man stood at the study door, looking at me.
Shocked, I inhaled sharply and held the breath.
The stranger whispered to me in an intense voice. When he was done, he put his finger over his lips. He spoke in Spanish but I knew enough to understand. He said, “I am a friend of your father’s. Be still.”
He was Latin. He looked a little like my stout, black-haired, round-faced Cousin Pancho. An Asturian, my father would say, referring to natives of the Spanish province of Asturias. “Pancho, you have the Asturian sturdiness,” my father liked to compliment his cousin. “You’re built like a thoroughbred bull. The one that gores the matador.” But I knew that my father preferred his own build, which he would praise using my body as a mirror. “You have the broad shoulders and narrow hips of the Gallego,” Francisco told me almost every time we were alone. “Women like that shape in a man,” he would add and smile into the distance. This strange Asturian moved on his toes toward the hall entrance. I remained stuck in place, holding my breath, watching him. I could hear that Mr. Stein was talking, but not the words.
“I understand,” my mother’s voice was loud, so loud I was startled. The Asturian also. He stopped in his tracks. Mom sounded strained and angry. “No further discussion is necessary. I’m sorry if any of this has caused trouble for you, although I don’t see how it has.”
“You don’t!” We could now hear Mr. Stein as well. The Asturian looked silly — he was stuck in mid-stride — arms out, heels off the floor. He settled back on his heels and sure enough, a loose floorboard groaned. We both gasped. But the sound of the front door shutting with a bang drowned out all those noises; and then Mom was there, staring at us with a look of surprise.
Surprised at what? Didn’t she know the Asturian was in the apartment? For an awful moment, I was scared I had made a mistake in keeping quiet.
“Rafe, I told you to stay in your room,” she said, thoroughly annoyed. “God damn it, don’t you listen to me?”
“Who was the man?” the Asturian asked in English. “A police?”
“No,” my mother frowned in disgust. “A nutty neighbor,” she dismissed him. “He lives on another floor. Wait a few minutes, then take the stairs. He’s nothing to worry about, anyway. He’s got nothing to do with the police.”
The Asturian turned to smile at me. “Your son,” he said in Spanish to my mother, “is very handsome. And intelligent, too,” he added. “He didn’t give me away.”
My mother walked over and hugged me. She ran her hands through my hair and pressed my face into her cleavage. She smelled of paint, turpentine and sweat. “He’s a good boy,” she said.
“I’m sorry to bring bad news.”
“It could be worse,” my mother said. She kept my face tight against her. My lips were parted by one of the Brooks Brothers buttons. It was as smooth and hard as a pebble.
“I’ll go now,” the Asturian said.
My mother released me.
“Let me check the hallway first,” she said and left us.
As soon as she was gone, he came over and whispered in English, “Your father gave me a message only for you. He said”—the Asturian paused, eyes on the ceiling, then recited the message— “‘Remember, Rafa, remember to yourself always, that you have the hard-headed common sense of the Nerudas. If trouble gets in your way, use your brain.’ No, no,” he corrected himself, “‘If trouble finds you, use your peasant brain.’” The Asturian tousled my hair, smiled and then rushed off after my mother in a comical way, a hurried waddle.
Of course I forgot my anger. When Ruth returned, I didn’t confront her about the ruination of my character. There was a calm look of concentration in her green eyes, a strange and beautiful contrast to the wild tangle of her black hair. Her posture, often defeated and wary since our return from Florida, was erect and alert. “He brought a letter from Daddy,” she said to me, but also not to me, speaking over my head and scanning the hallway intently, as if trying to decipher something on the wall. “He didn’t want me to read it to you, but I’m going to. I’m going to have to destroy it and I want you to know it really existed. It’s too important for you to believe on just my say-so.”