He’d set them down on the table, light a cigarette, and pop open a bottle of sweating Ballantine beer, while my mother, who did most of the cooking, looked over the contents of those packages: On a normal afternoon, they might contain a few pounds of filet mignon or breaded veal cutlets — what she called “empanadas”—or porterhouse steaks or a big plastic bag of Gulf shrimp too, or several whole chickens, or a slab of Swiss cheese, or a few pounds of finely sliced French ham or turkey breast, not to mention a pound or two of ground sirloin beef or a glowing one-pound brick of creamy Hotel Bar butter — items that, on such afternoons, seemed especially tempting since they were strictly forbidden to me.
Such meats jammed the freezer compartment and the shelves of our buzzing Frigidaire. We had so much of that stuff that I can remember my mother lamenting the waste, often throwing out packages of freezer-burned ground beef after they had lingered too long in the dense frost. In a way, when it came to food, my father was a kind of Cuban Santa Claus or Robin Hood, if you like. For whatever he would bring home, he always shared with our neighbors in the building and with his friends.
My mother did as well. For years, Mrs. Walker, “la muda,” could hardly pass by our first-floor apartment on her way home without knocking on the door; often enough, my mother found something from the refrigerator for her to take. I can recall watching Mrs. Walker, who, thin and wan, smoked up a storm herself, always letting her facial expressions stretch like rubber in every direction, her hands wildly working the air while attempting to convey to my mother some simple notion, like coming upstairs for a bite — Mrs. Walker spooning her fingers into her mouth and repeating, “Et, et, et,” while my mother, savoring a dawning moment of understanding, proclaimed in her heavy accent, “Jes, jes—food, food! Comida, ha!” and turned to me, saying, “You see, hijo, I can speaky the English!”
Sometimes, it would work out that we’d head upstairs into Mrs. Walker’s chaotic apartment: Her husband, a bartender working nights, somehow managed to sleep in a room in the back while their kids — Jeannie, Gracie, Carol, Jerry, and Richie — had the run of the house; I mainly remember that piles of clothes were laid out haphazardly all over the place, that she, like my mother, tended to bring in stuff off the street, all kinds of furniture in various states of disrepair lying here and there; and in her kitchen, where we would sit while Mrs. Walker, a nice lady, started to cook some things on the stove — say, some of the steaks my mother had given her — and went on and on about something, which I could barely comprehend, my mother, telling her things in Spanish, with a few words of English thrown in, seemed completely at home with that arrangement. One of those ladies who would smoke while eating, she’d sit down and have a snack, and my mother, sticking to her little finicky rules, refusing anything herself — she’d shake her head, pat her stomach to indicate that she was full — seemed content to bask in their oddly intimate relationship, unrestrained by language. Having a sweet soul, Mrs. Walker, aware that I had been so sick, would just look over at me and smile, blow me a kiss between puffs of smoke, and then, putting down her fork and cigarette, as she did one afternoon, make a rocking motion back and forth before her stomach, mumbling something in her mangled guttural speech, which my mother, tuned in, seemed to pick up on. In one instance, my mother, translating, told me, “Ay, pero, hijo, ella dice que fuiste un bebé muy lindo”—“She says that you were a beautiful baby.” And seeing that my mother had gotten that notion across to me, Mrs. Walker would reach over and pinch my cheek.
We wouldn’t stay long. I used to think that it would have been nice to play with Mrs. Walker’s kids, who had tons of board games on their couch, and the girls skipped rope in the living room, but my mother wouldn’t allow me to join them. Maybe one of them might have a cold without knowing it, and, in any case, there was a mustiness about that apartment, perhaps from all the old stuff that constantly accrued in the place, which must have struck my mother as unsanitary. So we’d head back downstairs, la muda talking up a garbled storm from her door, a nagging sensation bugging me that I had missed out on some fun once again, and the smell of that nicely cooking steak still in my nostrils.
On some evenings, my father cooked for his pals — steaks with onions and French fries or a simple platter of fried chorizos and eggs — dishes they managed to gobble down even while they continued to smoke (puff of cigarette, bite of food). My father always sent those fellows, wobbly legged and well sated by the time they’d leave, often around midnight — how they managed to get to work the next mornings, I do not know — off with a package or two of chicken or with some cold cuts, his generosity, to his mind, an important part of his very Cuban way of being.
Since we lived near the university, we were sometimes visited by a Cuban professor of the classics, a lonely-seeming baldheaded fellow of middle age, from Cienfuegos, by the name of Alfonso Reina, whom my father had happened to meet one afternoon while walking back from the subway across the campus. The professor always turned up with flowers for my mother and bonbons for her “preciosos” Cuban boys, though I could never have any. His overt gayness, the way his eyes would melt looking at my father and he’d always ask my older brother for a kiss on his mouth, somewhat disturbed my pop, who, in his old Cuban ways, felt somewhat uncomfortable with the fellow’s homosexuality but nevertheless welcomed him into our home for a meal and drinks, as long as there was someone else around, like his friend, the sturdily manly (if occasionally falling apart) Frankie the exterminator, as a buffer. He also welcomed into our kitchen one hell of a blessed fellow, from 119th Street, one Teddy Morgenbesser, formerly of Brooklyn, who worked in the accounts office of the La Prensa newspaper syndicate and had lucked out by falling in love with a bombshell Dominican babe, a certain Belen Ricart, who had two kids and with whom he lived outside of marriage. Jewish, he’d gotten so Hispanicized by her — and from a pretty active nightlife in the dance halls of the 1950s — that he spoke only Spanish in our home. But from what I could tell, he, with his dark hair parted in the middle, dark eyes, and Xavier Cugat mustache, as well as his way of wearing guayaberas whenever possible, seemed quite Cuban, and since I only knew him as Teddy, I assumed that was the case.