Of the two of us, José was always the more gifted: Lacking a center, I had a basically infantile mind and no sense of order; I was lackadaisical in my mode of dress, while he, a more sartorial sort, had the kind of instincts that simply amazed me. He knew how to iron a shirt or a pair of trousers to a sharp crispness, and given the challenge of creating a costume for a Halloween party, he once fashioned a gaucho outfit out of some pieces of felt cloth from which he made a vest and, flattening an old hat, came up with a new one with jangles along the brim, the final touch a wrapping in velvet cloth around his waist. (He sort of looked like Zorro and was quite handsome in the mirror before which he posed.) He was sharp in a way I would never be, and effortlessly so, though I doubt that he didn’t secretly work hard at it. Above all, I’d always thought, even then, of him as being far more Cuban than I, the Spanish he would speak with some of our neighbors seemingly of a level that I, in those days, could not begin to approach. (“Tu hermano es mucho más cubano,” my mother would always say.)
Nevertheless, sharp as he could be, he went through some rough times. Going back a few years, once the Catholic high school he had attended closed down, he ended up at George Washington up on 187th Street, a high school where he always had to watch his back (which is to say, people were always kicking one another’s asses) and from which by his senior year he had dropped out. (For the record, my parents were not happy about that.) He worked delivering Sunday newspapers, starting at six in the morning, a job I benefited from, because, working for tips, I’d deliver the missed issues of the New York Herald, the New York Journal American, and The New York Times around the neighborhood once the calls came in at about nine. (There was also the Daily News, which most people also ordered, those Sunday editions with their fabulous four-color comic pages weighing three or four pounds apiece. However, I don’t recall ever seeing a Spanish-language newspaper like El Diario on those racks.) He’d apparently also worked for a gay mortician for a time, around Washington Heights, whose advances in those parlors of cadavers he fended off. Altogether, though he seemed always to have money in his pocket, my brother remained a restless sort, looking for some distant horizon better than what we seemingly had before us. (A pet peeve of his was to the fact that the name Basulto still adorned, as it had for decades, the mailbox and bell.)
Generally, he rarely stayed at home, spending more than a few nights away — where, I don’t know; wherever he had been hanging out, perhaps at the homes of friends like the Valez family on 122nd or up on a rooftop on a mat. There came a day when his girlfriend’s brothers, dressed in their New York City police officers’ blue uniforms, began knocking at our door. They knocked because my brother, in the process of painting their sister nude, or at some other point — perhaps during their teenage outings to the piers under Coney Island’s boardwalk — had, in the parlance of the day, “gotten her in trouble.” She was pregnant, and her family was not pleased.
My father, coming to the door and probably knowing much more than he let on, claimed, as he faced those burly officers, to have no awareness of my brother’s whereabouts. (He spoke a low-toned, generally unaccented English, maybe Spanish-inflected in some ways but always calm.) In any case, after several visits with their officers’ hats in hand, they stayed away. One of those nights, when my brother had come home with the air of a fugitive on the run, my father, despite their differences, sat him down in the kitchen and counseled him — an unusual thing in our family — as to his choices. Given the situation, I think it came down to the following: Either marry her or get lost. My brother would always say that my father, without a drink in his gut, rose to the occasion and, truly concerned, advised him well. Not so much to take the high road perhaps, but to consider what would be best for his future. For, as it turned out, my brother, eighteen at the time and with a pregnant girlfriend with a cop family to worry about tracking him down, decided to enlist in the air force, and within a few months, he was gone.
CHAPTER 4. Childhood Ends
The thing about my pop is that he never wanted to hurt anyone. Not consciously at least. He’d always have something of that güajiro quietude about him, and while he had his vices, he never sloughed off his responsibilities when it came to work and supporting the household. Much liked at the Biltmore, his nickname was Caridad, or Charity, for his giving nature. And while he underwent his occasional metamorphosis from a gentle Jekyll into an oblivion-seeking Hyde, for the most part, people liked him.
I’ve always remembered him as a man who stoically engaged the mornings. As a kid I always awoke to the sound of his footsteps in the hall, for he’d leave around six for his early shift at the hotel. I’d hear the door opening carefully, the jangle of keys and the turn of the lock, then the door closing shut against the rickety frame; he made more noise than he should have. He’d step out into the absolute stillness of those New York mornings, the city silent and deserted at that hour; only the duration of Sundays, when hardly anything opened in those days, approached them in their quietude. He’d go down the hill of 118th Street to Amsterdam Avenue, a newspaper tucked under his arm, his ambling stride unmistakable, then head up a few blocks south to 116th (the path ascended), where he would cross the Columbia University campus to the subway kiosk on Broadway, seeing few people along the way. Occasionally, he’d meet up with Mr. Hall from upstairs, who worked for the LIRR. They were good friends, though I don’t know what they might have talked about. Occasionally, a milk truck or a bus passed by on the street, but generally when he set out to work, he did so by himself.
Into the bowels of the subway he would go, with its dirty platforms and penny Chiclets and five-cent Hershey bar dispensers on the columns, and board his train downtown and eventually over to Grand Central, the seats in those days still often covered in lacquered cane. He’d make that journey, no matter how he might have been feeling, or the weather, even when snow had piled high on the streets and sidewalks. To miss work was unthinkable to him.
Given the way he’d spend many of his evenings, he was probably in a constant state of fatigue — cigarettes, it seemed, helped him keep going. He worked two jobs after 1960, at the Biltmore and at the Campus Faculty Club rooftop restaurant, on top of a high-rise Columbiaowned residential hotel, Butler Hall, a block over on 119th Street. For years he didn’t sleep much, and of course, his greatest pleasure remained the company of his friends. His warm manner, publicly, attracted smiles: Sitting out on the stoop, he conversed happily with anyone who happened by. Language was never a barrier. Though I’d grow up with the notion that my father was lucky enough to have mastered English as well as he did, he, in fact, also learned to speak serviceable amounts of German, Russian, Greek, and Italian at the hotel, where the staff consisted mainly of immigrants like himself — which is to say, it seems that he had a facility with language. It amazes me to think that had he been born twenty years sooner, around 1895 or so, he may well have spent his entire life on a farm in Cuba, riding a horse, perhaps alongside his brother, instead of passing his days in the kitchen of a midtown hotel preparing grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and grilled steaks for the usual Men’s Bar clientele of boozing business executives, errant college boys, and the occasional famed personality — like Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra and perhaps, in all his years there, Ernest Hemingway. (I will never know.)