Milton Ramos
Rose of Lima.
Daughters of Jacob.
Ten minutes in either institution made him feel like he was breathing air through a pinched straw. Visiting both in the same day left him feeling like a clubbed seal.
First that fucking school: some kind of parent/career-day event that had him standing there rocking from foot to foot like a beetle-browed dummy in front of two dozen third graders, the good-looking lay teacher in the back of the room nose-down in paperwork, not even listening or raising her eyes to him as he mumbled his way through the joys of the Job.
And those questions . . .
Did you ever kill anybody?
No.
(One, but he had it coming.)
Can I see your gun?
I’m not carrying one.
(No, you can’t see my goddamn gun.)
Did you ever come to my tío’s house?
Who’s your tío?
Reuben Matos. He lives on Sherman Avenue.
Yeah, once.
(At least.)
How much money do you make?
Enough to pay tuition here.
Do you ever get mad at Sofia?
Never.
(Never.)
How come she’s so fat?
Milton looking to his daughter seated front and center, staring at him with resigned eyes, then back at the kid who asked the question.
How come you’re so ugly?
Is her mommy really dead?
Yes.
How did she die?
Hello? This to the head-down half-a-nun in the rear of the room. What are you doing back there, smoking crack?
That’s not a nice question, Anthony, she said, still not looking up.
What’s your favorite team?
The Red Sox.
Boooo . . .
Do you like Big Papi?
I am Big Papi.
And again: Did you ever kill anybody?
I said no.
(Two, but they had it coming. Three.)
And now this here, the Daughters of Jacob Assisted Living Center, the air redolent of boiled hot dogs and Lysol, Mantovani strings drifting through the halls like musical Haldol, old folks sitting alone in the lobby just staring at air, filling him with anger at their AWOL kids. Before he could even make his way to the elevator banks, and not for the first time, one old lady, confusing him with some José from building services, asked him when he was coming to fix her radiator.
His aunt Pauline had her own small suite—at least he had been able to swing that for her—and as she went on and on about a gluey Hawaiian salad she had been served the week before, he sat on her living room couch and took in the art on display: a bowl of silver and gold papier-maché fruit, a plaster pair of life-sized praying hands, two—count ’em—two ceramic menorahs, a glazed and mounted ram’s horn, and a framed print of a fiddler floating sideways above an off-balance ghetto. Aunt, excuse, Tante Pauline had stayed in the faith, if only sentimentally, unlike her sister, Milton’s mother, who married a PR to spite her parents. On the other hand, his father had married his mother to spite her parents, too. It was a match made in hell, and if his old man’s this-time-for-good disappearance when Milton was ten was not exactly a cause for celebration, it wasn’t nearly enough of a blow to throw anyone off their feed.
“So, you didn’t bring Sofie?” Pauline asked.
“Sofia. She has school. I’ll bring her on the weekend.”
Seated across from him on an oversized throne chair, her hands clasped atop her kettle-drum midriff, his aunt tracked his gaze to the framed photos of his, and her, dead family members, the images scattered across the side tables and windowsills.
“I talk to them all the time,” she said.
“Me too.”
“In the middle of the night, sometimes I wake up and see my sister standing in a corner of the room.”
“I see all of them.”
“Your brother was such a sweetheart.”
“Which one,” although he knew. Little Man had been everybody’s favorite.
“That day killed your mother.”
“Killed my other brother too.”
“Who, Edgar?”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “your oldest nephew.”
“Edgar was always so surly.”
Milton stood up, took a little walk around the coffee table to settle himself.
“He took care of us, Aunt Pauline. My mom with her circulation, half the time she couldn’t even make it out of the house.”
“You were pretty surly back then, too. The both of you. But look at you now, a real man who doesn’t forget his family.”
“Family’s everything.”
“I can’t even get my own children to visit me, but you come by like clockwork.”
Of course he did. Pauline had taken him in for three years, right after the slow-motion massacre had come to an end, the move from the Bronx to her home in Brooklyn most likely saving his life.
He drew a breath before shifting gears. “Aunt Pauline, when you would come and visit us back then, do you remember a girl in our building, Carmen? Puerto Rican, about fifteen years old?”
“Carmen?”
“Maybe spent time with Little—with Rudy?”
“Carmen . . .”
“Skinny, big eyes, long hair.”
“Wait, Carmen. From downstairs. Her mother was Dolores.”
“Right. Did you ever see her with Rudy?”
“Dolores?”
“Carmen.”
“What, like together?”
“Like anything, holding hands, making out, arguing maybe.”
“Dolores had a son too, Willy? William?”
“Victor. But let’s stick with Carmen.”
“He was supposed to be a little, you know, that way, the boy, not that it bothered me.”
“Aunt Pauline,” Milton said, waving his hand. “Carmen. Did you ever see her with Rudy.”
“I can’t remember.”
“Think hard.”
“I wish I could.”
“No problem.” It was a long shot anyhow.
“Why are you asking about Carmen all of a sudden?”
“Nothing.” Milton shrugged, trying to keep his voice as casual as he could. “I thought I maybe saw her. It was probably somebody else.”
But was it really her? Oh yeah, you bet. How could he ever forget those tea-stained big eyes, pulled down sad at the corners like the eyes of the lost and burning girls on the Anima Sola postcards that used to turn him on when he was a kid. He’d even had a crush on her for a hot minute when her family had first moved into the building, a sense memory so galling and torturous to him now that it made him want to rip out his brain.
He glanced at the sunburst clock over Pauline’s head: two-thirty, teatime. He went to the refrigerator and poured her a brimming glass from the half gallon of Gallo Family Zinfandel she kept in there.
“Seventy-four years old, I’m finally an alkie,” she said, her standard line whenever he did the honors.
“You’ll live.”
“Why did you and your brother always call Rudy Little Man?”
“Because everybody else in the family topped out at five-eight, then Rudy gets born and he’s all of a sudden six-three.”
“I don’t get it.”
His eyes turned dull as nickels.
“Whatever happened to Dolores?” Pauline asked.
“I heard she got cancer,” Milton said, “about two years after the . . .”
After the what: tragedy? He hated that word, it reeked of, what . . . Fate? Inevitability? Bullshit. Tears and a turn for home? Fuck you. Surrender to the mysteriousness of the Great Mysterian?
Surrender; what can ya do.
Plenty.
“And they never found those bastards who killed him,” she said.
“No, they didn’t, Tante Pauline.” Milton rising, this time to leave. “And they never will.”