I found her in the kitchen preparing a big pot of lentil soup, one of her favorite meals, as she had become quite a health food nut by then, and one bent on preserving herself into eternity — she was just a few years short of seventy. (Her dresser drawers, aside from containing a number of artifacts from her life with my pop, and religious pamphlets and rosaries, also brimmed over with Spanish-language magazines about health and diets.) When I walked in, after giving three quick trills of the timbre, she was surprised — and vaguely delighted — to see me in the middle of the day. She felt put out, however: My mother hadn’t gotten around to making herself up or bothered to get dressed. She wore only a robe and seemed as if she had not awakened too long before, and though she told me to sit down, and started to putter about the stove, I just said: “Mamá, get dressed, I want to show you something.”
“Sí?”” she asked.
“Sí, mamá, a surprise.”
“Ah, una sorpresa,” she replied, rather happily.
It took her a while: Years later, I’d learn the hard way that her side of the family had arthritic maladies in their blood, and as she moved deliberately but slowly about her bedroom, getting dressed, I could hear her giving little cries of “ay, ay, ay!” Finally, she had gotten herself together, and, escorting her down the street, rather impatiently, as I couldn’t wait for her to see that window, we finally reached the corner, where I hailed another taxi. By then, because of my mother’s rheumatic condition, it was always an operation getting her in and out of any vehicle, but did I care? My moment had arrived! No matter how often my mother asked me where we were going, and why, the only thing I could say to her, and gleefully so (you know, like a good son), was that she would soon enough see something to make her happy and proud of me.
So we hurried downtown, and even though only an hour at most had passed since I’d left that store, by the time we pulled up to the curb, the window had already been changed, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose now in the place of honor so briefly given to me.
Having no choice but to take her inside, the only thing I could show her were a few of my books on a shelf. The staff seemed embarrassed, as did I, but afterward I took my mother to a pastry shop nearby and bought her some napoleons, the sort my pop occasionally brought home. I don’t think she ever had a clue as to how crestfallen I felt: At least I got some insight, right there and then, into the nature of that business.
As for those bus ads? They ran for about three months, and though my novel did not fly off the shelves, the enticement that I would produce a similar advertisement and space for a paperback induced a fellow named Pat O’Connor, at Washington Square Press, to spring for the paperback rights, a big twenty-five hundred dollars (half of which I split with the publisher). In exchange, they’d benefit from another ad campaign. I recall riding buses and seeing people looking up and checking out that advertisement, and occasionally I’d run into a friend who’d noticed it, but if it made my name and book known to the public in any way, I wasn’t particularly aware of it.
Only once did it make a real difference. I think the paperback ads had started to run in the autumn of 1984, and that same October, I came down with another one of my horrific flus. Having become the sort of person who would do everything in his power to avoid seeing a doctor, I reluctantly decided to drag my sorry ass over to St. Luke’s emergency room one night, but only after I had started coughing up blood. (That scared me: Despite my plaguelike symptoms — bad stomach, aching bones, diarrhea, scorched throat, and burning nose — I had managed to continue smoking my Kool cigarettes until I could barely swallow.) Once I got to that waiting room, filled with every variety of junkie, alcoholic, stab victim, abused wife, and sick child, as well as a contingent of bloodied and bruised homeless people, I fell into an immediate gloom. Not only did going there again remind me of my childhood visits to that place, but I knew that however bad I felt, I’d have to spend half the night waiting.
Up by the desk, manned by a Puerto Rican nurse who had the hardened demeanor of someone who had seen every possible permutation of human suffering, her porcelain face a mask of cinnamon indifference, I filled out a medical questionnaire and handed it to her. As she looked it over, her brows rose with interest: “Hijuelos? Where would I have seen this name before?” I didn’t connect anything with it and shrugged. But then something hit her: “Oh, yeah, I know, I seen it on a bus — the numbah eleven Amsterdam line — could that be?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You wrote a book, is that right?”
“That’s me.”
“Well, for God’s sake — good for you.” And she smiled. “Lord, I wish I could do that — oh, the things I’ve seen! You wouldn’t believe it.” Then she took a good long look at me — at my deathly sweaty pallor, my bloodshot eyes, my drooping body — and, leaning forward, confided: “Tell you what, to save you time, I’m gonna admit you right away, okay, honey?”
“You kidding?”
“Why would I kid an author”—she pronounced it Arthur—“like you?”
I ended up getting out of there about an hour later, and it took me almost a week to get better; and when I did, I dropped a copy of the paperback of Our House off at that ward, inscribing it to that admitting nurse, whose name, it turned out, for all her toughness, was Daisy.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was about the extent to which those bus ads helped me.
In the interim, a few interesting things happened: At one point, enriched by my final advance of some eight hundred dollars or so, I flew out to Southern California to visit my former down-the-hall neighbors from Eighty-third and, while staying in their complex in San Diego, began a poolside romance with a twentyish divorcée in progress who happened to be a former Miss Los Angeles. I won’t dwell on the tawdrier details, though I will say that after I had come back to New York, we often spoke by telephone in the evenings. As it happened, these took place during a period when, for reasons involving one of my cousin’s husbands, my line was tapped.
You see, back in 1983, the FBI had listed my cousin Miriam’s husband, Eduardo Arocena, who had stayed in our apartment back when, as their number one most wanted fugitive. He was suspected of having been the head (and founder) of an anti-Castro organization, Omega Seven, and of ordering or carrying out the assassination of a Cuban diplomat. Personally, I found it hard to believe that Eddie, un hombre muy callado, a quiet and gentle man, could be behind such a thing, but the truth was that he had been on the lam, as they’d say in gangster movies, for some time (though it had not stopped him from calling me up the previous Christmas to wish me well, while also proclaiming, “Viva Cuba libre!”)
Eventually, the search became so intense that the FBI sent two officers over to 118th Street to interview my mother, and though she had fallen back on the claim that she spoke “too leetle Engeleesh,” one of the officers, a very well dressed American “Negrito,” as she described him, naturally hit the clutch and slipped into a ridiculously fluent Castellano — Castilian Spanish — that dazzled my mother. (That’s what she mainly talked about for weeks — about how that American black man had spoken such a refined Spanish.) In the end, she had nothing to tell them; she certainly did not know of his whereabouts — why would she?