A few days later, when McCabe and I were eating stuffed Cornish hen, she suddenly burst into tears. Fat, abundant tears fell on her plate and began to liquefy the bird’s grease. I kept a sympathetic expression on my face while I observed the interaction between the warm, salty water emanating from her beady blue eyes and the slowly de-congealing grease of the hen. “I did not love,” she hiccupped. “Not deeply, I mean, not really, not the way I should have loved.” I controlled a tickle in my throat, a tremor in my stomach, afraid my own half-digested hen would shoot out of my mouth and hit the pervert on her reddening nose. Was she referring to Bebe? I dared not ask. I hoped she wouldn’t tell. I did not want to kill her in a rage. Besides, there was nothing on the table to kill her with. You don’t put out a carving knife for Cornish hen.
She was a brute, McCabe, particularly when she drank, and she had already polished off a bottle of the cheap red wine I got for her (given that she couldn’t tell the difference, was unwilling to learn, and mocked me when I tried to teach her, I reserved the good bottles for solitary consumption in my room, and drank water at table while she contentedly guzzled crap). Once before, drunk on the day after our arrival, McCabe had socked me in the nose after I broke the rule and mentioned Bebe. I lost consciousness. When I came to, McCabe wasn’t there. She had locked herself in her bedroom—her suite, really, because it occupied the entire upper floor of the house. The Judge’s only folly, as Monsieur de la Trouille would say, in an entire life of sobriety and civic uprightness, was to have knocked down all the partition walls on the upstairs floor shortly after his wife’s death, turning a warren of dark tiny rooms into a stupendous open space. I saw it briefly the day McCabe and I arrived, after which I forbade myself to go up the stairs to her landing, much less to knock on her door. Only once did I feel any desire to break this rule: when I got back on my feet the night she knocked me out cold. I almost banged on her door and kicked in her ugly teeth. I did not do anything of the sort, but only added another line to her indictment. Next day, her first on the job, Petrona came down from McCabe’s room holding in front of her, sleepwalker style, a bundle of vomit-soaked sheets.
7
Elmira
The Little Ohio River, which is not a branch of the Ohio River, but of the muddier and narrower Wanetka, slices through Elmira in a fairly straight line. The east bank rises steeply for about half a mile in a succession of hills and meadows culminating in the one where Judge Wilkerson’s house sits. Geographically, this highest point is Round Hill, but Elmirans call the entire area by that name. It is here that the town’s masters used to live before the Great Hunger and where they still occasionally return. The successful doctors, lawyers and orthodontists (no dentists) near the river, the more serious money higher up, say, for instance, the CEO of the now defunct Krimble Dairy Industries, the biggest in the state, or the owner of the equally defunct ARCO Engineering Corp., who had a lock on all highway work in these parts. There was also a former state Governor or two, magically able to afford Round Hill after leaving office. Even higher up was whatever was left of the old money, entrenched in their hereditary estates, people like Judge Wilkerson and his wife, Myrna, whose family house this was, and whose great-grandfather built railways as far away as Chicago and Biloxi. The Judge and Mrs. Wilkerson used to visit New York once a year around Christmas, to meet with their portfolio manager and shop at Bergdorf’s and Paul Stuart’s, moderately, for they were not showy.
Downtown Elmira is on the west bank flatlands, directly across from Round Hill and linked to it by a short bridge. Main Street, with its graceful nineteenth-century brick buildings that still house the inept county bureaucracy, ran decorously along the river for about half a mile before it dissolved into a decrepit shopping center, two white-trash trailer parks and several car dumps masquerading as garages.
Beyond the grisly Royal Tire and Brake, where car, dog, and perhaps human carcasses intermingled, began a swampy area that stretched all the way to the county line. It was there that a local man, after bribing the proper authorities, slapped in an illegal sewer line draining into the river, built a two-way road above it, and began selling lots on either side. He called it Shangri-La.
For fifteen years there were no takers. Then one day, some Negroes who worked at Elmira’s poultry factory were spotted building a small cinder-block house in the lot nearest the main road (the degenerate continuation of Elmira’s Main Street). Soon, others followed, working nights and weekends to build their little grey houses. By the time I, the first spic baby, was born, all the lots on either side of the original Shangri-La road were built, down to the cheapest ones by the river edge, where we lived, and which periodically flooded. Afterward, five more roads sprouted parallel to the original one, with lots snapped up by the Mexicans who replaced the Negroes in Elmira County’s remaining poultry factory. But that happened long after I left.
When I was little, there were only two spic families in Shangri-La, Rafael Cohen’s and ours. Neither was Mexican nor worked with poultry. Rafael’s father was a janitor in our grade school until he retired. He never learned English. Not a word in forty years, beyond gumornin, guafernún, zenquiu, gubái, no spic inglich. According to my mother, the good and the bad thing about Ezequiel was that he was content with his fate. My mother and Ezequiel had grown up as next-door neighbors in La Esperanza, a dusty-red sugar mill town in the old Cuban province of Santa Clara, and gone to grade school together. Ezequiel had ended up marrying my mother’s cousin, Genoveva, a few months after my parents’ own wedding. The two couples had left La Esperanza together in 1958, looking for jobs up North. Ezequiel had left reluctantly. My mother’s mother, recently widowed, soon followed them. Somehow (I never got a satisfactory answer why) they had ended up in Elmira’s Shangri-La, where Rafael and I were born in 1964, two days apart: he on the twenty-fifth of December, I on the twenty-third.
Now our four parents were buried side by side in Shangri-La’s small cemetery. They braved the Great Hunger, refusing evacuation to protect their homes, and survived on potatoes, wild roots, and questionable fish for seven years. Then, they all died of natural causes statistically much sooner than the national median in both their native and their adopted countries: phlebitis (Ezequiel), lung cancer (Genoveva), heart attack (my father), diabetes and renal failure (my mother). Genoveva and my father would have died anywhere anyway, but Ezequiel and my mother were killed by the Elmira General Hospital, which sent the first one home to die unattended and grossly mismanaged the second’s treatment. If only I could graft McCabe to Elmira, so Elmira dies with her: two vultures with one stone. Now there are only two little founding spics left: Rafael and I. He is in besieged Constantinople today on a surprise national security mission, the radio says. And I am looking at Shangri-La from the top of Round Hill, a brownish spot on the river bend, barely visible in the early morning mist. I should weep: it’s the appropriate thing to do. I try but I can’t.
8
Fasting
McCabe did not come down for dinner on the evening of September 14. The precise date is carved in my ears, where the braying from Saint Glykeria, Martyr reverberated all day—it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and one hundred frenzied Kyrie Eleisons were sung every time the bearded one lifted the cross. When cotton balls failed, I plugged my ears with melted wax, burning my fingertips and the outer rim of the ear canal, and the thunderous braying became a mere muffled sawmill screech. Deprived of hearing and, oddly, olfaction for the day, I suspected something was afoot only when I saw Petrona leaving a tray by McCabe’s door. The tray held a silver bell cover, a bottle of Perrier-Jouët, and a vase with a yellow rose freshly cut from the garden. The dinner table was set only for me.