No Matter How Much You Promise

  This book is dedicated to

  Alyson

  But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women.

  —James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

  There is no rule for painting al fresco. Every artist may do as he pleases provided he paints as thinly as possible and only while the plaster is wet, six to eight hours from the moment it is applied. No retouching of any kind afterward. Every artist develops his own way of planning his conception and transferring it onto the wet plaster. Every method is as good as the other. Or the artist may improvise without any previous sketches.

  —José Clemente Orozco, Mexican muralist

  Music, though it does not employ human beings, although it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that?

  —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  First Movement - The Quest

  1. Here and There

  2. Name That Girl

  3. Creature Discomforts

  4. Zing! Went the Strings

  5. A Latin from Manhattan

  6. Identity

  7. From A to Z

  8. Catharsis

  9. Sanity and Insanity

  10. Dear Diary

  11. Jamming

  12. An Ideal Scenario

  13. Families

  14. Research

  15. A Diaphanous Curtain

  16. Meeting Monk

  17. Slumming

  Second Movement - The Horizon

  18. The Offering

  19. A Road Less Traveled

  20. Choices

  21. Conjuring

  22. African Antecedents

  23. Banjo Blues

  24. Going to School

  25. Exiles

  26. Philosophy

  27. The Band

  28. Of Promises and Leprechauns

  29. Blind Walking

  30. The Idea

  31. Hanging Out

  32. Just One of Those Things

  33. Ruby Broadway

  34. Consequences

  35. Confrontation

  36. Jazz

  37. Going Home

  38. Drums

  39. Photo Album

  40. The Music

  41. The Piano

  42. Faceless Shadows

  Third Movement - The Journey

  43. The Four Horsemen of Avenue B

  44. Economics

  45. Tumba Santiago

  46. Clave

  47. The Return

  48. Memories

  49. A Day in Harlem

  50. First Date

  51. Threats

  52. Explorations

  53. Group Therapy

  54. Back from the Jungle

  55. The Lie

  56. Race

  57. Passing

  58. People of Color

  59. An American Boy

  60. Sermon

  61. Combat Readiness

  62. An Awful Kaleidoscope

  63. Where Have All the Flowers Gone

  64. Flashback

  Fourth Movement - The Drum

  65. Mourning

  66. Never Coming Home Again

  67. The Gig

  68. Don’t Let a Little Black Stop You

  69. Little Rootie Tootie

  70. Santurce

  Also by Edgardo Vega Yunqué

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  First Movement

  The Quest

  1. Here and There

  In the not so merry month of May 1988, when her studies had evolved into a drag, Vidamía Farrell, finishing her sophomore year of high school, again became as restless as she had the previous four years. In spite of ample evidence of her eventual metamorphosis into a scholar of consequence, the upcoming end of the school year had become an extraspecial time ever since her parents, but mostly her mother, and perhaps for the wrong reasons, had come to the understanding that it would be ethnically beneficial for Vidamía to spend part of the summer with her father.

  As she stood rigidly inside a quadratic equation and stared at a sky full of nimbusian elephants, Vidamía thought again of her father, Billy Farrell, in her mind a figure of considerable mythic qualities, whom she both admired and pitied once she got to know him, and decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to help him make a reentry into more acceptable human society. She didn’t meet her father until the age of twelve, when she learned that once upon a time her father had sat in the middle of a Vietnamese rice paddy, under a shower of steel, cradling the broken and forever useless body of her uncle, Joey Santiago of Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of New York City, whom she would never meet since time and space didn’t allow for such stratagems.

  Billy Farrell had cried while he held the eviscerated corpse of his ace, his homeboy, his reefer-smoking main man. Such was the shock, that Billy didn’t notice that the drizzle of steel, while it had barely touched his own head, had meticulously erased his catalogue of the musical techniques of Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, and other jazz pianists. However, even if that aspersion of steel had not removed from consciousness the complex knowledge of flatted sevenths, augmented ninths, intricate harmonic patterns, and improvisational virtuosity that Billy had at one time displayed, he would have been unable to perform adequately, he believed, his own renditions of such standards as “Moonlight in Vermont,” “April in Paris,” “Back Home Again in Indiana,” or “Autumn in New York” not because he lacked a geographical metronome, but because that baptismal of steel had neatly severed, at the root, the middle and pinkie fingers of his right hand, rendering him an eight-fingered jazz pianist, a phenomenon more rare than an arctic orchid.

  As Billy recalled, the medics finally appeared. Making their way through the sticky heat and the soupy stirfry of growing rice, detached limbs, and involuntary bowel movements, and the monotonic keening of thousands of flies, the medics removed the lifeless body of Joey Santiago from Billy’s semi-catatonic, eight-fingered, shock-induced clutches and placed it in a body bag. They then saw Billy’s lacerated scalp and the empty places in his hand, shot morphine into him, and whisked him off in a medevac helicopter.

  At the hospital in Da Nang, while they shaved his skull as preparation for neurosurgical engineering, the doctors, after cleansing and disinfecting the wounds, sent Billy, by way of various anesthetics, into a never-never land of painless musings. They then stretched the torn and jagged epidermis of his right hand over the first knuckles of his middle and pinkie fingers and stitched them up. Not a minute elapsed before the surgeons addressed Billy’s cranium. The shrapnel had removed one and a half centimeters of bone from the upper-left side of his head above the ear. After inserting a minute metal plate where the hole had been, the surgeons sewed up his scalp. Ironically, given Billy’s preference in music, on certain ionospherically hospitable nights, the metal insertion picked up a country-music station in Wheeling, West Virginia, so that his battlefield nightmares were now accompanied by music more suitable to the soundtrack for a moonshiner and revenuer film starring Robert Mitchum and his sons.

  The doct
ors, having failed, in his view, to scoop up from that rice paddy the spilled Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck, et al., plus his personal repository of blues, ragtime, Dixieland, swing, bop, West Coast, and progressive solos of hundreds of musicians ranging from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Ornette Coleman, were left wondering why Billy said nothing but simply stared at the ceiling. He often held up his right hand, now bandaged against infection, and, within that mitt of gauze, attempted to wiggle his absent digits, which at one time, together with the perfectly matched fingers of his gifted left hand, had surrounded intricate melodies as would the hands of a child a delicate spring butterfly, admiring it briefly and then letting it go to watch it dance lepidopterally away.

  For eight months, first at the hospital in Vietnam, then one in Japan, and subsequently in the States, Billy Farrell sat and stared bleakly at his crab hand, not recognizing it as his. Doctors and counselors and chaplains came and went, but none of them apologized for their failure to retrieve the music from the rice paddy. Having lost, along with the spilled music, his temperament, inventiveness, and musical technique, Billy Farrell had only love left. Eventually he told everyone he was fine, thank you very much and God bless you. When they asked him where they should send his disability check he said please send it care of my grandpa, Buck Sanderson, in Yonkers, New York, the chaplain has the address.

  As Vidamía grew up and learned that other girls were called Jane, Joan, Jean, Jeannette, Ginny, Ginger, and even Gloria, Carmen, Maria, Teresa, but not Vidamía, and if they had mothers who looked like her mother they had last names like Rivera, Rodriguez, Vásquez, López, but not Farrell, she demanded to know everything about her father. When her mother, Elsa, ignored her, brushing off her concerns as unimportant, she went to her grandmother, Ursula Santiago. All Grandma Ursula would say was that her father had been in the war with her uncle Joey. Her uncle had been killed and her father had been hurt. His name was Billy Farrell and he had blond hair and blue eyes and used to live in Yonkers.

  “How did they meet?” Vidamía had asked on one of those rare occasions when her mother brought her into the city and left her with her grandmother. “How? He and my mother, huh, güelita?” Vidamía inquired, practically pinning her grandmother against the stove where she had been stirring a pot of red beans in sauce for the better part of an eternity.

  “You have to ask your mother that,” Ursula said, in the accented English of the Island of Enchantment, Puerto Rico, tierra de mis amores, jardín de flores donde yo nací, linguistic cha-cha. “I’m sure she knows, mijita.”

  “She won’t tell me.”

  “She must have her reasons.”

  So in the summer that she turned twelve, aware that in riding the train back and forth between Tarrytown and New York one of the stops was Yonkers, she created a plan. Having saved six months’ of allowance, Vidamía set out to find Billy Farrell, going off one Saturday, ostensibly to visit the Guggenheim Museum with her friend from summer camp, thirteen-year-old Janet Shapiro, who lived on Sutton Place. Artfully coordinating her cover and promulgating the lie with the skill of a graduate of one of your best disinformation finishing schools, rather than making the complete journey to Grand Central Station she got off the train in Yonkers. Filled with trepidation but determined in her resolve, she went forward. Like some fear-maddened mammal, she burrowed into the telephone directory, digging down through the alphabet until she reached the required depth. Methodically, she copied the name, address, and telephone number of every Farrell in town. After an hour or so of changing dollar bills into dimes and making useless Saturday-afternoon telephone calls to unsuspecting Farrells, in which, by deepening her voice or holding a handkerchief over the instrument, she masqueraded immaturely as officials of governmental bureaus, banks, or insurance companies, Vidamía began to feel the frustration of the amateur sleuth and, overcome by her despondency, sat on the curb to ponder what she must next do.

  So overwhelmed by the desolation of defeat did she appear, that a policeman by the name of Arnold Tyson decided she must be a runaway and inquired as to her predicament. When she explained her quest, Officer Tyson, who had gone to high school with Billy, dutifully drove Vidamía in his patrol car across the bridge to see Maud Farrell, Billy’s mother, who was also known as the big, good-looking blonde who tends bar at O’Hanlon’s in Mount Vernon.

  “Mrs. Farrell, this little girl’s looking for Billy,” Officer Tyson said, urging Vidamía up on a barstool. “Says Billy’s her father.”

  “You want a ginger ale?” asked Maud Farrell.

  “No, thank you,” Vidamía replied.

  “What’s your name, darling?” Maud Farrell then said, scooping up ice cubes with a glass from the bin behind the bar.

  “Vidamía. Vidamía Farrell,” said the little Spanish wisp with freckles on her nose as Maud later described Vidamía to her friend, Ruby Broadway, also known as the good-looking Negro woman who ran the house where firemen, policemen, and railroad men went when they grew tired of listening to their wives talking about coupons, color TVs, and new skin-care products.

  “And you know my son?” Maud said as she set a glass on the gleaming surface of the bar.

  “No, but I know he’s my father. He and my uncle were in the war. My uncle died. Here’s a picture.”

  And from the large leather bag she carried slung over her shoulder as if she were a bona fide teenager, Vidamía produced the worn picture of Billy Farrell and Joey Santiago in Vietnam that she had discovered in one of her mother’s trunks while Elsa was in the Bahamas with her stepfather two weeks prior.

  “Could be,” Maud said, looking at the picture and then at Officer Tyson before pouring ginger ale into the glass. “As Irish a face as you’d want,” she added as she scrutinized Vidamía’s physiognomy. “Same shape mouth as Billy. Drink up, honey.”

  “No, thank you,” Vidamía said.

  “Look, if I’m gonna be your grandmother, you better do as you’re told,” Maud said, depositing her formidable bosom on the bar and squinting her eyes like I Love Lucy on TV so that Vidamía was charmed into smiling. “It’s free and it’ll make your nose tickle.”

  “Okay,” Vidamía said, taking little sips and letting the bubbles strike her face.

  And so Maud Farrell became a grandmother to Vidamía and on Saturday afternoons when she was off from O’Hanlon’s she fed Vidamía bologna sandwiches and ice-cold root beer and brought her carefully in touch with her lineage, explaining, through family anecdote, fable, and myth, that Billy had indeed been in the war and had suffered a life-threatening injury that had left him in many respects incapacitated, but not in that way, she said, meaning his capacity to reproduce, saying it not luridly but thankfully, so that huge maternal tears emerged from her big blue eyes and she hugged Vidamía to her, making the girl cry and laugh at the same time and say, “Grandma, you got mayonnaise on your cheek.”

  “The Kid,” Maud Farrell called him, telling Vidamía he had been so christened in his Yonkers—Mount Vernon boyhood for no apparent reason by his maternal grandfather, Buck Sanderson, of banjo-playing fame, of whom it was told—mostly by him—that he had played on Mississippi riverboats and knew a thousand-and-one tunes which he taught the boy from the time he was one and a half years and was labeled a musical genius, by the same Buck Sanderson, grandfather, who, after playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a Christmas xylophone had handed the infant Billy the mallet and the boy, not yet able to form coherent vocal sounds, had, without any hesitation, reproduced every note of the song flawlessly from “Mary had” to “sure to go.” When everyone had applauded, Baby Billy looked at them totally surprised at their glee, and they swear to this day that he had a look that chided their naïveté, as if he knew there was little complexity to the tune.

  It turned out, Vidamía learned, that when Billy was released from the hospital, he’d flown from California to New York, staying with his mama’s parents, listening to the two of them bickering about everything as he
always had in his childhood.

  Between unbidden flashbacks of the war, Billy permitted his grandfather to teach him the guitar, letting the big old man hold him while he cried when he couldn’t form a B7 even with his good hand. Somewhere in the distance of his personal history, in some placid place of guarded memory, he knew that at one time the chords poured into his mind fluidly, the music going directly to his left hand, that wonderful, ramblingand-walking left hand, chording, laying down the music as if it were a road filled with beautiful landscapes. Patiently urged by his Grandpa Buck, Billy persisted and after a while, when he knew twelve or so chords and could play and sing folk songs such as “The Fox” and “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” together with some Leadbelly like “Easy Rider,” or “John Henry,” he called his mother and said he was going into the city, meaning Manhattan.

  Maud, with the concern only a mother could have, said that he should be careful and that if he was starting to get restless and in need of companionship, there were plenty of girls right in the neighborhood willing to douse his ardor, especially Margie Biancalana, the little Italian girl whose father owned the barbershop and who just last Saturday had said, “Hi, Mrs. Farrell, how’s Billy?” Or maybe Adele Botnick, who was studying to be a doctor but always liked jazz and had been asking for him.

  So Maud, feeling foolish for bringing up the subject, went on to say that he was welcome to use her apartment while she was at O’Hanlon’s during the day, as long as he changed the sheets and straightened up after he was finished, because she sometimes got the same way and had men friends because she was still a relatively young woman, and that she hoped that he didn’t think it was because she hadn’t loved his father—may he rest in peace—because she had and still did, or that he wasn’t angry now because she was discussing adult matters.