The rum was for Mick’s private tribute. He’d worked as a bouncer at a strip club on Forty-second Street and lived with one of the dancers, a striking Puerto Rican woman who’d introduced Mick to Santeria. He’d become an initiate and wanted to become a santero. He wore his caracoles—a shell necklace no one was allowed to touch — and brought a thick black candle inscribed with esoteric symbols that he erected before our father’s tomato patch as if we had buried him in the back yard. It was an offering made to Oya, patron of whirlwinds and cemeteries, to ease the entrance to the world of the dead. Oya’s syncretic form, he explained, to ease our mother’s misgivings, was Our Lady of Montserrat. Beside the candle, he set a shot of rum; Oya, fiercest of the female orishas, liked her drink strong. In the humid, bug-roaring darkness of Memphis, the orange candle flame flickered eerily off the tomato netting until Moms went out and drenched it with a blast from the garden hose.
The rum that Oya didn’t require Mick and I killed driving around at night between barbecue places and country bars in my father’s gold Chrysler. We ended up in a pool hall. My father had been a skilled pool player. Neither Mick nor I had inherited the gene. Maybe it was the similarity of our inept play, but people kept asking if we were twins. No, we told them, just brothers.
After the funeral we served a meal of Memphis barbecue and Lower East Side Polish sausage to my father’s surviving brother and three of his sisters, who’d all traveled from Chicago. We said a brief prayer and downed a wisniowka in a silent toast to my father’s memory.
I sat beside my aunt Olga, my father’s youngest sister.
“When we were kids, your father kept us all going,” she told me. “One year, when we barely had enough to eat, he somehow managed to show up with a tree on Christmas Eve, because, he said, our family shouldn’t be without one. He was a good brother. He was a good guy.”
“He never told me about that,” I said.
She dabbed her eyes. “There’s a lot he didn’t talk about.”
That was the first of times to come when missing my father took the shape of being startled that he was no longer there to answer a question regarding a past I knew so little about, to which he’d been my only link. I wished, with an intensity that ambushed me, that I could have asked him for the details on how he’d come up with the tree. It sounded like another story that might have made Charles Dickens proud.
When, in her composition, Camille Estrada told how she’d seen Charles Dickens standing on Washtenaw, I too saw him, a familiar face among the crowd watching Tito Guízar ride by. Camille might have argued that if Tito Guizar could actually appear parading through Little Village behind the miraculous Virgin, then why not Charles Dickens? The appearance of the Mexican cowboy star, complete with stallion, sombrero, a guitar strapped across his back, was barely less remarkable than that of an old British writer would have been. Dickens was the man in a starched collar with a blue cravat that matched his worn, serious eyes; his auburn hair was thinning, his flowing beard was the kind one saw on hoboes who lived by the railroad tracks. That was how Dickens was pictured on the card in Authors, a game our family played. Dickens shared the deck with Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Longfellow, Tennyson, Louisa May Alcott, Twain, Poe, Hawthorne. At bedtime, our mother would read from those authors to Mick and me.
“No wild stuff,” she’d caution, “this is reading time.”
It was the closest thing Mick and I had to sacred time.
On the Dickens card, beneath his likeness, four books were listed: Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol. Of those, Moms read Oliver Twist. We owned a set of 78 rpm records of a dramatized reading of A Christmas Carol starring Basil Rathbone, who was also Sherlock Holmes. My father had gotten a good deal on it at Maxwell Street.
Camille had tried to summon up the authority of Dickens’s fiction to justify the true story of Ralphie she wanted to tell, a story destined to end with the hopelessly pathetic fact of a boy dying on Christmas Eve. On some level she must have asked herself, who would read A Christmas Carol a second time if Tiny Tim died at the end? She needed a rebirth, a resurrection. A year had passed without a single miracle. Although parishioners had prayed for the Blue Boy so long that it had become a habit, they were bound to give up praying to him. It would occur to them, as it had to me the one shameful time I prayed to Ralphie and asked him to help me make the basketball team, that if Ralphie’s wish to make his First Holy Communion hadn’t been granted, why would he have the clout to intercede for anyone else? Gradually, but sooner than had ever seemed possible, he would be forgotten.
Camille needed to summon the timeless power of Dickens’s story in order to superimpose what remained of Ralphie’s spirit on the streets of Little Village. Her borrowing of images from Dickens wasn’t so different from the local spray-can artists who painted murals on the crumbling walls, as if Diego Rivera — like visions might shore up what urban renewal had not. There was a permanence to Dickens’s story that Camille aspired to. And in that, her tribute was not unlike the tributes of the gang bangers who sometimes tattooed an indelible blue tear at the outside corner of one eye in memory of a wasted homey. That was what Tony Bizzaro did after his brother, Peanuts, died.
It’s about feeling, Camille had told me that one afternoon when we were Partners in Christ.
She refused to settle for a tribute that took the shape of silence. She failed for want of accuracy, but not of feeling. Not for want of amor.
I don’t know what became of Camille Estrada. After Christmas break that year in eighth grade, a rumor spread that beneath the blue cardigan buttoned to the top no matter what the weather, Camille was wearing falsies. Sister Lucy didn’t inquire about the matter directly. Instead, she asked Camille not to wear the sweater during class, it wasn’t part of the school uniform. Camille correctly observed that by eighth grade the uniform code wasn’t strictly enforced, and besides, she was cold. So Sister Lucy offered to move her to a desk beside the radiators. Camille thanked her politely and said that wouldn’t be necessary, in the future she would leave her sweater at home.
But the following day, Camille still wore the blue sweater. After morning prayer, Sister Lucy reminded Camille that she’d promised to leave her sweater at home and asked her to hang it in the wardrobe — immediately. Camille remained seated, composed, silent, defiant. Sister Lucy observed that such behavior was hardly what she expected from the class valedictorian. The class went quiet. There’d never been a hint of confrontation between Camille and any of the nuns before.
“I want you to remove your sweater now,” Sister said, taking a step down the aisle toward Camille.
Camille replied softly in Spanish.
“What did you just say?” Sister Lucy demanded. The previously inconceivable possibility that Camille might have just cursed her stopped her in her tracks.
I, too, wondered if Camille had cursed. But later, Angel told me what she’d said was a proverb he’d heard his abuela use: “El hábito no hace al monje.” The habit doesn’t make the monk.