Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (24 page)

“It is very silly to be upset because I mention him. People know about it,
mi amor
. Daniel’s editor asked him what he knew about you and Alex and Roy. You are no longer a secret. Hiding in here changes nothing. You have to talk about what happened. Whatever it was, it isn’t worth your death. You survived it. You will survive better if you tell me about it.”

Gloria said nothing.

“Since you won’t speak I will tell you a story. You know everybody in it—your mother, Max, Cody and me. I was in school in Havana with
las monjitas
. Your mother was not getting work on Broadway because they wanted her only as a Latina and there were no Latina parts. She was beautiful, her English was perfect, her singing voice still rich, and she wanted to keep on with her career. So she came back to where she began, the nightclubs of Havana. There were more clubs than ever and more customers, so many Americanos and she was Esme Suárez, the Broadway star. The hottest clubs wanted her, Tropicana, Sans Souci, Montmartre, you know all this. She would work some weeks, then stop working, but she would always go to the clubs for dinner. Max did not like clubs the way Esme liked them, so she took me as her chaperone and we would see Chevalier and Cugat and Beny Moré and Dietrich, so many. The managers would bring the stars to our table and everybody adored your mother. So spirited,
qué viva
,
qué alegre
! Now I am going to tell you something. Sometimes men would take my hand and ask me to dance, but your mother would say, ‘Look but do not touch.’ She was thirty-two and I was sixteen, a nightclub virgin. You were a virgin when you asked me for lessons in the sexual life. They were for Alex, no?”

Gloria closed her eyes on the question.

“Of course they were. But your virginity is of no importance, nor is mine. One night at the Club Montmartre Max came to our table with a black musician, Cody, the first time I met him. He was from New York but he wanted to leave it and Max got him work at Night and Day, an American piano bar in old Havana. Max and Cody were friends since Cody was with Billie Holiday. He was the first to play for Billie and the newspaper said they were going to marry, but it ended. Billie loved Cody but she was a crazy person who worked very hard to destroy herself. Cody would never hurt her and she seemed to go with men who did hurt her. Many women are like this. Not me. If they hurt me I will do everything to hurt them. But that is not what I’m telling you. This night we had dinner and Cody talked very much with me, a sweet man who would never hurt anybody, shy almost, handsome, and your mother’s age. I liked him very much and I knew I could fall in love with him if I was older. I was almost in love with him while we talked but I did not know much about love yet. I felt it without knowing what it meant. But Max saw it in my face before my sister saw it. I was also in love with Max. I was in love with all men who liked me because I did not yet know about love. Max, and you know this, is a womanizer. Everybody knows this. He womanized with me when I was fourteen but he did not touch me. Never. We would laugh and he would talk about movie stars in love and tell me I would soon be a movie star and should know everything about love. Max loved many women. He had favorites, like your mother, but he went to the woman who was in front of his eyes. This night I am talking about he saw Cody touch my arm. Cody was telling me about his sad life, that his wife had left him and taken their son and he could not see the boy. It was years after this before he got his son back, and his son, of course, is Roy. He was telling me about Roy, that he was two years younger than I and that I would like him. I was listening very hard and I was sad for Cody. He touched my arm and when he did I touched his hand. Max was watching us and he said, ‘Get your fucking nigger hands off her.’ Cody could not believe it. I could not believe it. Cody said to him, ‘Sure, boss, sure,’ and got up and left the club. Max had never used such words in front of me. I went to the
baño
and cried for Cody and when I came out Max was gone. The next day your mother went to a lawyer to divorce him.”

Gloria leaned close. “Because of what he said to Cody?”

“No,
mi amor
, because he was obsessed.”

“With Cody?”

“With me.”

Gloria had known Alex Fitzgibbon since before she could remember. He had flown to Havana in the late 1940s to carouse in winter and see his old Yale buddy who was a resident expert in Cuban carousal, Max Osborne. Max brought Alex home to meet Esme and Gloria, and even when Esme and Max separated in 1953 for the first time, Alex kept the social connection.

Batista had made his coup against Prío in 1952 and he and the mob were thriving from the casinos, the brothels, the tourists. Castro was in jail for leading the assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago in 1953, and Batista’s repression of rebels was vast and deadly. Esme, working steadily in nightclubs, kept Gloria, now seven, in the care of a nana, but grew fearful of violent politics. Max was political, but who knew on which side? Death came easily to such men and their families from the madness abroad in Cuba, in which the vengeful punished the innocent as readily as they punished their enemies. And if Esme would not herself leave Havana (she believed she’d never leave it again) she could protect Gloria. And so Esme decided to put her in the hands of the same Catholic nuns who had educated Renata and herself in convent schools in Cuba and Manhattan.

The Manhattan convent school Esme had gone to no longer existed in 1953, but when Alex came to visit he told her of one in Albany where Latin Catholics for decades had sent their innocent daughters to be educated bilingually by an order of nuns that was as elite as the Jesuits. Esme flirted casually with Alex, without consequence, and though he owed her nothing, she knew he would godfather Gloria’s every need. He was, after all, Max’s close friend, the Mayor of a heavily Catholic city, he had political power, and he was an Episcopalian, which was almost Catholic.

“Those nuns are purity itself,” Alex told Esme, “and they’ll preserve her from excessive sophistication.”

The words were magical to Esme, who wanted Gloria to have the adolescent purity that had eluded her. And so, at age seven, Gloria was enrolled in the convent school at Albany and, except for one year in Cuba with her mother after Castro’s triumph, she spent her elementary and high school years in a cocoon of holiness, as that concept was understood by the holy women of Sagrado Corazón.

When Gloria asked Renata for instructions on how to behave with a man—“What are the special secret things and how do you do them?”—Renata worried about wounding such innocence.

“Do you mean kissing and touching?”

“Yes, but more,” Gloria said.

“You mean complete sex?”

“I don’t know how to think about it complete.”

“You know how it is done,
verdad
?”

“I may not,” said Gloria.

“You know the sex parts of the body.”

“I know my own, but I don’t know much about them. About that.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know what I don’t know. In health class we saw a slide show on female anatomy but Sister Mary Kneeling Bench referred to those parts of the body in Latin, so we didn’t understand the words. We were told never to wear open-toed sandals because our toes might look like the male organ, which most of us had never seen. Our chests had to be flat, our knees invisible, and we weren’t allowed books, magazines, or movies that might be obscene.”

“Did you ever see boys from other schools? At dances?”

“We were chaperoned. If we danced we had to be a foot apart, and if we ever sat on a boy’s lap we were told to put a telephone book under us before we sat down.”

“No sane person would tell you that.”

“Some people say the nuns are insane, but they are only holy women.”

“You know how to get a baby—tell me they let you know that much.”

“I know it somewhat. When you menstruate you can have babies. I asked Mama if nuns menstruated and she said they did. Then why don’t they have babies? And she said because God knows they’re not married.”

“Oh, my silly sister. Child, why do you come to me with these questions?”

“I have a friend, and I want to behave right. I know you know how to behave right with men.”

“What is right? Sexually safe? Is that your fear?”

“What do you mean by safe? I want to know how to do things, or not do things, whatever those things are. Do you understand?”

“I am trying.”

“I want to be with him.”

“But that is the point. How do you mean, with?”

“What do you mean how do I mean with?”

“I mean do you really want to sleep with him? That way, with.”

“I want him to like me.”

“I’m sure he does already.”

“When we’re close I want to be sure how to do things.”

“You don’t want to disappoint him if you sleep with him all the way.”

“What is all the way?”

“All the way is everything, giving him your body.”

“Is that so easy to do? Exactly?”

“Very easy, even when it is not exact.”

“I think I want to sleep with him even if I don’t sleep with what you call everything.”

“You don’t sleep with everything, you do everything.”

“Then no.”

“No? What do you mean no?”

“It seems too soon for everything since I really know nothing.”

“Oh, child—
ay ay ay ay ay.
” And she waited. “I don’t recommend this, but perhaps, just perhaps to begin, you can tease him and then stop.”

“Is it possible to stop?”

“Once you start, the body will want to continue. But you can teach yourself in your mind.”

“How would I tease him?”

“You do not say no when he asks. You say yes,
un poquito
. But not all the way yes. Maybe later it will be yes. Then you push him away, but nicely, and kiss him while you do it. Has he asked about any of this?”

“No.”

“What does he do?”

“He kisses me.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. He’s tall.”

“Does he touch your body?”

“My face and arms, my hands. He doesn’t do any of the with thing you mentioned.”

The with thing. They educated this child to be a social idiot. So Renata spoke of seduction, how to talk to the man, how to be shy, how to grow bolder, when to laugh, because sometimes it really is funny, but you must not laugh at the wrong time or he will lose his mood. She spoke of clothing being loose here, tight there, the positioning of skirts, the crossing of legs, the ways of sitting. Renata put on a dress that shaped her figure but did not drape it, modeled a blouse and a skirt and demonstrated the visible arcs of the breasts, fleeting evidence of stockinged thigh, and the gradations of temptation through lingerie. She spoke of the control of one’s eyes and mouth, the things a man or a woman may desire and which desires you must postpone till another day. She did not speak of coition in explicit language. She did not want to use those words yet, either in Spanish or English, but she spoke of specific places being touched and pushing his hand away from other places. When you decide not to push him away then you are more or less doing it, and you will probably do it all, and then you will be with him. She mentioned the condom, without which you do not do the with thing. She spoke of a favored way of being with and suggested one angular variation on that. There are many ways of being with, she said, but you do not have to do them all at the same time, although some day you may try. The essential attitude when you are finally deciding not to say no is to think deeply about what you are doing, to think of yes as an act of love. One should not, on this night, or this afternoon, be with him just to be with. That may come later. On this night, or perhaps it is an afternoon, one must be the vessel of love, and when that happens you will know everything forever and will need no more lessons.

“Do you know what love is,
amorcita
?”

“I think I do,” Gloria said.

“Good. Then the nuns have not totally destroyed you.”

Gloria’s lesson in not going all the way came in March of 1964 when she