Speak to Me of Home

Chapter Twenty-Seven

San Juan, Puerto Rico

1991

Ruth and Mama walked together into the beachfront building in Luquillo the day after they buried Titi Lola. Ruth couldn’t remember ever seeing her mother sweat as much as she had on this trip, her grief like a fur coat in summer.

“Ay, it’s so hot!” Mama rummaged in her handbag for a fan while Ruth hit the appropriate button in the elevator.

When they opened the door into Lola’s living room, the air inside was even warmer, and Ruth was briefly afraid her mother would swoon.

“Sit down, Mama,” she said, and then she went straight to the AC window unit and turned it on high.

Mama sat down for only a minute before going to stand in front of that air conditioner with her eyes closed, turning her face at different angles, stretching her neck so the cold air could reach into the new folds she was developing there. Mama hadn’t dyed her hair since the news of Dolores’s sudden death, and it wasn’t like her to return home with her roots on display. Such slovenliness went against her mother’s sense of herself as a glamorous woman of the world, a swanning sophisticate who visited Puerto Rico much the way a sitting pope might occasionally visit the fond, distant, native country of his pre-papal life. But grief will shuffle and transfigure. The parent and child switch places. So Mama seemed unconcerned about the grayness of her roots as the blast from the air conditioner flung the curls away from her head, pushing them behind her like a whipping flag.

Ruth moved back to the doorway and closed the portón behind her. From across the hall, she could hear the soft patter of merengue music and smell something garlicky in a frying pan. Mama sat down on the couch.

“You okay now, Mama?”

Ruth had always considered her mother to be somewhat immune to weakness, even when Ruth was little, before her parents’ divorce. Even during those years when Mama seldom laughed, it didn’t occur to Ruth to worry about her mother, because there was some way in which Mama always seemed to hover just outside the reach of vulnerability. She was stalwart, impregnable. But whatever Mama-fortress had once existed, whether real or imagined, it was demolished the very instant Lola died. Mama looked smaller now, adrift on Lola’s couch, and Ruth felt a new urge to protect her, to make her own arms into scaffolding and shore up whatever disintegration was afoot.

“Close the big door too,” Mama said.

Ruth locked the portón and then swung the main door shut behind it. The music and garlic disappeared. They were alone in the quiet.

“Was it always this hot here?” Mama tipped her head back and closed her eyes.

“It didn’t use to bother you so much,” Ruth said, dropping the keys on the kitchen counter. “You didn’t even notice it when we were little.”

Ruth crossed to the sliding glass doors and pulled back the curtains, felt herself catch a gasp in her throat just as she did every time she took in this view after a long absence. Beyond the white railings and plastic patio furniture, it was impossible to discern where the turquoise sea separated itself from the turquoise sky. Below them, a hot apron of sand was studded with palm trees tossing their hair in the wind.

“We used to just open the windows,” Ruth said, flipping the lock with her thumb and rolling open the slider. “Remember?”

The wind came into the room and splayed the curtains, knocking over a vase of dead daisies on the end table behind them.

“It’s too strong,” her mother complained, plopping herself on the couch. “Close it, close it. You’ll let the cold air out.”

She waved a hand toward Ruth, and within moments, she was asleep sitting up on the couch, her mouth drooping slightly, the wicked, persistent exhaustion of grief. It was one of Ruth’s first lessons in obliteration. She was nineteen years old, and though she’d faced some challenges in her life—leaving Puerto Rico, learning English, getting used to her father’s new wife—she liked to think of those events as character-building. All those experiences had taught her things, made her stronger. But this time felt different, there was no life lesson here. Lola was gone. She was too young to be dead, and yet dead she was, and Mama’s annihilation was so absolute, it felt as though most of her had gone with Lola into that other place.

Ruth cleaned up the dead daisies and went out for a walk alone while her mother slept sitting up on the couch. She strolled the length of the crescent sand barefoot while the sun traveled west and low, her legs moving at a pace only this island could generate while the heat seeped out of the ground beneath her heels. She met a gathering of dogs on the beach, their humans standing well back from the shoreline, chatting while the dogs chased and nipped and rocketed through the surf together. Ruth listened to the familiar shapes of the humans’ accents, and felt the weight of how much she’d lost, how much language she’d forgotten. She’d been so young when they left. Almost three quarters of her life, she had called another place home.

Maybe Ruth wasn’t from anywhere anymore, she thought. Or maybe she just had to keep looking. She’d been in New Jersey for almost two years now, and though she had no boyfriend (and not for lack of trying), she did have friends, roommates. She had fun. Maybe this feeling of internal drift was just part of growing up, maybe everyone felt like this until they found their way. She didn’t like dwelling on any of it. It was gut-wrenching to think Lola was gone; why did it also have to transform her mother into this relic of herself? And why, on top of everything else, did grief have to punch holes in Ruth’s already-shaky sense of herself? It was hard enough to get through the abyss of these days without fielding new questions about who she was and where she belonged. She wanted to evict all of this nonsense from her brain. She did her best to breathe through it. Ruth asked those questions to leave her alone.

At the western curl of the beach where the land protruded before turning back to itself, where the water changed color in the rocky shallows, Ruth plopped her denim bottom down right in the sand. She rested her elbows on her propped knees and watched the colors saturate the early evening sky. The wind carried the scent of someone’s balcony barbecue. There was a calming hypnosis in the rhythm of the waves, a slowness in Ruth’s breath that she forgot every time she left here and remembered again every time she returned. She experienced this forgetting and remembering, this rolling amnesia, as a kind of spiritual atrophy. Each time she returned, she had to face the sharpening truth that she could no longer access the simple concept of home. She both belonged and did not belong at all, no matter where she was.

Why did we leave here? she thought, looking out at the colors, sinking her fingers into the cool sand.

A treachery, though: she thought it in English.

They spent the rest of that week cleaning out Lola’s apartment to prepare it as a vacation rental. Mama complained about the heat every day, so Ruth left her in the front rooms, where she could work in the artificial cold from the air conditioner.

“I’ll start in the bedroom,” she told her mother.

She marked boxes for keeping and donating, and kept an open bag for garbage. Ruth took care of the bedroom closet first, and then the dresser and nightstand before tackling the paperwork. Lola’s desk was a rolltop, small and tidy, with different cubbies to keep everything organized. Stamps here, envelopes here, pens here, extra staples. There was a single deep drawer where Lola kept her paperwork, minimal and orderly. Only one folder bulged with aging keepsakes, which Ruth saved for last because she expected it to be the most difficult. She sat cross-legged on Lola’s bed and took a deep breath before opening the folder. Inside were some report cards from grade school, an old black-and-white photograph of somebody Ruth didn’t recognize, a Playbill from the original Broadway production of West Side Story at the Winter Garden Theatre, and several ancient letters, which Ruth felt momentarily conflicted about reading.

But then, a memory: her mother and Titi Lola sitting together at the round wooden table in the kitchen in St. Louis, maybe five years ago. Ruth was around fifteen years old, Benny seventeenish. The two women were sitting in perfect quiet when Ruth walked in and found them sipping coffee.

“What’s this?” Ruth said, immediately suspicious of their silence.

“Shhh!” They waved her into their cloud of secrecy, and she realized they were eavesdropping. In every slope of their shared posture, the rigid spines, the hovering hands, the cones of their ears trained eagerly toward the bottom of the staircase.

Mama pointed overhead. “Benny’s talking to that girl Amanda again,” she whispered to Ruth, and brought a finger to her lips.

Ruth hesitated for only a moment. “You know there’s a more effective way to do this, right?”

Both women turned to look at her across the tops of their coffee mugs while she dragged the tabletop phone from its stand beside the back door.

“But he’ll hear the click!” Lola warned.

“Not if you hold down the mute button,” Ruth said.

The women were gleeful, bouncing lightly in their seats while Ruth pressed the mute button and carefully lifted the receiver. She held it up between them so they could all hear. There was almost no reward for this coordinated betrayal. The conversation was dull. Amanda talked about her lacrosse practice and her split ends, and Benny didn’t even pretend to care. They could hear him maneuvering the joystick on his Atari. Ruth remembered how they all tried not to laugh when Benny came down in his socks to grab a Coke from the fridge. Titi Lola pretended to study her split ends, and their mother nearly fell off her chair laughing.

“All right there, Mama?” Benny asked, popping the tab on his drink.

In Lola’s bedroom in Luquillo, Ruth spoke out loud in case her tía’s ghost was listening. “It’s not like you placed a ton of value on privacy, let’s be honest.” Then she unfolded the first letter.

Three of them were bona fide love letters from the young man in the black-and-white photograph whose name turned out to be Alejandro and who, in his final letter, declared his intention to marry someone else. Over the years, Ruth had caught snippets of the story about Lola’s teenage beau, who’d dumped her and married her best friend after Papamío’s demise, but Ruth had never heard that scoundrel’s name, had never seen his asinine face before. Ruth hated that Titi Lola had kept Alejandro’s letters; she wanted to punch him in the throat. But knowing that Lola had preserved them, for whatever reason, Ruth found that she was unable to toss them either. She slipped them back into the envelope and felt the sadness close around her like a caul.

The remaining letter in the folder was addressed to Papamío, and it was unusual because it was written in English.

“I know this handwriting,” Ruth said quietly. She recognized it from the annual birthday and Christmas cards, which constituted the majority of her relationship with Grandpa Pete since that one disastrous Christmas when she was eleven years old. Why did Titi Lola have a letter from Grandpa Pete? Ruth didn’t even think they knew each other. She opened the letter without thinking and read it in a blaze. Then, in swelling turmoil, she read it again more slowly.

“What the hell?” she said out loud.

Ruth read the letter once more, and then flipped it over to see if there was anything else, anything to help her reconcile this piece-of-shit letter with her grandfather, anything to help her loosen the stone it had lodged in her gut. She’d always known that Grandpa was sort of racist, but because she loved him, she’d wanted to believe it wasn’t really his fault. It was his generation, his family, the way he grew up. In the twenty years of her life, there’d been a handful of times when Ruth had felt like she was on the cusp of discovering exactly what it was that Grandpa felt toward Mama. She remembered the word uppity from the Christmas dinner, perhaps only because she’d had to ask Mama later what it meant, and when Mama had arched an eyebrow and declined to answer, Ruth made a special trip to the school library to look it up. It wasn’t in the dictionary, either, so she’d resorted to asking the librarian.

“Oh, it just means when somebody’s too big for their britches,” the lady had said unhelpfully to Ruth.

“Britches?” Ruth asked.

But the lady shooed her along back out to the playground.

Even after all that, after witnessing a number of inexplicable, impatient exchanges with waitresses over the years, after hearing Grandpa use the n-word once to describe a Chicago Bears running back whom he also deemed uppity , Ruth still hadn’t fully put it together. Because she had some complicated feelings about how she thought of herself (mostly white) (but still Puerto Rican) (but still, almost totally white) (and also, completely Puerto Rican), and because Grandpa had always treated her with love and affection, Ruth had never accepted that her grandfather’s bigotry might really extend to Mama, and might even extend to her .

Now, with the letter shaking in her hand, Ruth felt like an idiot. Because of course it extended to her. She read the letter one more time, stretching her synapses, trying to force it to make sense. But no, there were the words quite plainly, meant to describe her future self, meant to describe Benny. The room was suddenly too hot with the window open and the breeze rummaging through. Ruth lay back on Lola’s pillows and breathed through her mouth.

When they’d moved to St. Louis, it was Grandpa Pete who had bought Ruth her first winter coat, white and puffy with a chevron of blue-and-pink stripes. He held her hand at the checkout counter, and said some coarse words to a woman behind them in line who’d gestured at Ruth and made a comment Ruth hadn’t understood.

On Lola’s bed, the cog and wheel were reluctant to turn in Ruth’s mind. It felt like a visit to the eye doctor, like someone had just changed the lens in front of her eye and suddenly everything looked different. Ruth longed to return to the previous blurry lens, but it was gone, replaced by the malignant scrawl on the page in front of her, snapped into focus. So many things suddenly made sense.

Ruth stood up from the bed and moved toward the door with the letter in her hand. She touched the doorknob, but then it occurred to her that maybe Mama didn’t know about this letter. Perhaps Ruth could spare her mother the painful sharpening of that blurry lens. Ruth stood with her hand on the doorknob and looked again at the date it was written, April 1968. Just a few weeks before her parents’ wedding. Mama had enough grief right now.

Ruth had no way of knowing why the slanting script was smudged, but the blue ink had never quite recovered from that hot June day in Lola’s bra. The softness of the paper belied the sharpness of the words it contained.

April 18, 1968

Dear Mr. Acuna & Torres,

I trust all is well in Porto Rico. By now you may have heard from my son Peter that he intends to ask for your daughter’s hand, despite the strident advice and misgivings of his family. We obviously have not met your daughter, who I’m sure is a lovely girl, but Peter did send us a picture from Trinidad, and I’m sure you’ll agree that this match, though sweet, is ill-advised in the long term.

I don’t know how things are done down there, but here in the States, decent people don’t mix races. Not because we have anything against Porto Ricans or any other race of people, but because the mixing isn’t natural, and it provokes awful hardships for those involved, especially the poor half-breed children. This is why mixed race marriage is still illegal here, and it’s my understanding that the laws of this land apply to your people as well.

I have thus far failed in my efforts to convince my son that his heart has led him astray. He’s quite bewitched by your charming Raphaella. I urge you to provide our children with the guidance they need, to remind them that marriage endures long after the blush of desire has gone. It’s as much for your daughter as for my son that I make this appeal, for neither one of them will be long happy in a marriage that so defies convention. What can they possibly have in common? It’s only the foolhardy bravado of youth that compels them.

At heart, my son is a respectful young man who will require your blessing in order to marry your daughter, so only you can convince him to desist from this reckless plan. I expect that, as a father and fellow Catholic, you share my concerns. If we fail to prevent this engagement, then I must insist that you provide evidence that their union will be a lawful one. Please send documentation of your daughter’s lineage, along with your personal reassurance that she is not sullied by negro blood, though the photograph my son sent along seems evidence enough to the contrary.

It is my fervent hope that we can resolve this affair between us without having to seek legal recourse in the aftermath.

Yours,

Peter Brennan Sr.

St. Louis, Missouri

Keeping the letter from Mama felt like the most grown-up decision Ruth had ever made, choosing to bear the hardship of it herself and spare her mother whatever pain it might arouse. Ruth did not extend that same consideration to her father, not because she cared less about him, but because it simply didn’t occur to her. Because her father was a good father, because of his generation and his bearing and the way he conducted himself with his children, Ruth almost never considered Dad’s feelings. In fact, she was only vaguely aware that he might have them.

As Peter saw it, his job as her father was to execute the function of cornerstone, column, and buttress. His role was to receive his daughter’s distress with unflappable calm, and to provide her with solutions. The prospect of his own possible anguish was not typically a factor in the arrangement of their affairs.

Ruth waited until fall, until Dad came from St. Louis to help move her out of mama’s new house in Montclair where she’d spent most of the summer, and back into the dorms at Wodsley. There was really no reason for him to come because, although Mama didn’t love move-in day, Ruth didn’t have that much stuff, and it was a half hour drive. Ruth could borrow Mama’s car and do the move herself in two trips. But Dad came every year because he liked to see where she’d be living.

“I’m paying for half of it!” he’d say. “Need to make sure I’m getting my money’s worth.” And he’d flop down on the bed to check the mattress.

His visit became part of each semester’s ritual, and after each move-in day, Ruth would discover a funny picture her father had hidden somewhere for her to find. He called them inspirational portraits , and they were of Gandhi or Jesus or Oprah, tucked inside Ruth’s pillowcase, or slipped into the back pocket of her favorite jeans, or taped beneath the battery compartment of her keyboard. In Sharpie, he’d have added a ridiculous caption like, “Jesus is confident you’ll make the dean’s list this semester!” or “Oprah knows you’ve got this in the bag!”

On the evening of move-in day her junior year, Dad and his wife, Trisha, took Ruth to her favorite restaurant for dinner, and the letter, which Ruth kept in her handbag the whole time, was so distracting, Ruth could hardly enjoy her chicken tikka masala. But she waited all the way through the meal because she didn’t want to talk about it in front of Trisha.

After dinner they went back to the Radisson, where Trisha, who insisted she was suffering from jet lag and who’d yawned all the way through dessert, went up to bed even though it was only 9:15 P.M. , which meant it was only 8:15 in St. Louis. Ruth and Dad had managed not to make eye contact any of the four times Trisha mentioned the jet lag, and waited until the moment the elevator doors slipped shut behind her to collapse into hysterics for several minutes.

“Oh, she must be so exhausted.” Ruth wiped a tear from one eye.

“It’s not easy being an international jet-setter, Ruth,” Dad said, and then he pulled an honest-to-God handkerchief out of his back pocket and used it to mop up the evidence of his laughter.

They found the quietest corner of the lobby then, and sat down in two chairs facing each other. There was a low orange table between them, where Ruth set the offending letter.

“I found this,” she said. “Earlier this summer, when I went with Mama to clean out Lola’s apartment.”

Dad looked at Ruth’s face, and then at the letter. There was the memory of laughter still clinging around them, and for this, Ruth felt grateful. A safety net for a fraught conversation. Ruth was sure Dad would recognize his father’s handwriting immediately, but she couldn’t tell right away if he’d ever seen the letter before. She watched him carefully as he leaned over to pick it up, as he read it, as the shame and horror of it fell across his face. When he was done reading, he placed it face down on the table between them. He tucked his lips into his mouth and there was a quiver on his features that Ruth had never seen before. Or maybe she had never really looked. His eyes were as blue as they’d ever been, lined with crow’s feet now at the corners, and his hair was shot through with sparks of silver.

“Well.” Dad cleared his throat. “They always were set against us. I’m very sorry you had to find that.”

Ruth blew all the breath from her lungs. “Me too,” she said, and waited for him to say more.

“I’m sorry it exists in the first place,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, then immediately leaned forward again, elbows on knees.

“Well, obviously it’s not your fault it exists,” she said. “You didn’t write it. But did you know about it?” She assessed him carefully to see if she could find the truth on his face, independent of whatever he would say.

“Yes and no,” Dad said.

Ruth made her face into a question.

“I knew the letter existed at one time,” Dad said. “I didn’t know Lola had saved it.”

“Had you read it before?”

“No.”

“So when you say you knew it existed—”

“I knew my father had written to Papamío. Expressing concerns.”

“Expressing concerns,” Ruth repeated.

“Well,” Dad said. “I know my father, so I had some idea the letter would’ve been offensive, but…”

Ruth waited for him to continue, but he’d stalled out. Ruth wasn’t sure what she expected him to say here anyway. He wasn’t even married to Mama anymore. They’d been divorced for almost a decade, and he had a whole new life now. A functional, happy marriage this time. Still, it was Dad who brought her up. He used his fingers to pin the letter to the orange table.

“Did you show this to your mother?”

“No,” Ruth said.

Dad breathed, and in the swing of his breath, Ruth saw what he’d been so careful to protect her from all these years. She saw that he had feelings about this. Ruth had never seen him cry, and it would not happen tonight either, but the tears were there, nonetheless.

“You did the right thing,” he said, finally, shaking his head. “Your mother went through enough when we were married. She doesn’t need to be reminded of this after all these years. It’s disgusting.”

They had never talked about Mama, never discussed the marriage or the divorce, or Ruth’s early years in Puerto Rico. This was the first time, a hallmark.

“You know, I will never love anyone the way I loved your mother,” Dad said. He pushed a catch out of his throat and glanced lightly toward the elevator before the second half of the confession. “The way I will always love her.”

His face was crumpled with emotion, and Ruth was baffled. “But. What about Trisha?”

“Oh, sweetie. One has nothing to do with the other.” He smiled sadly. “Trisha makes me happy . So happy. That’s a totally different kind of love. It’s easy. What your mom and I had, those sweet, domesticated years, she was my family, my everything. We made you! And Benny. That’s the best thing I ever did. So yeah, the marriage was hard. But my God, that was love. It was priceless.”

Ruth could hardly believe what she was hearing. “But then why? If it was that precious, why didn’t you make it work, do whatever it took?”

“It just… the love we had for each other, the foundation.” Dad felt his way carefully through the sentence, word to word. “It couldn’t withstand the pressure of what she had to endure.” Dad looked down at the table between them as if he could watch the memories of their life together play out across its surface. “For me, it wasn’t hard.” He paused, remembering. “I mean, the cooking was bad.”

Ruth laughed. “Oh, I remember!”

“I mean bad ,” Dad said. “But I didn’t care much about that, not really.”

Ruth nodded.

“The only hard part for me was seeing how unhappy she became,” he said. “It hurt that I couldn’t keep her happy. I couldn’t shield her from everything she went through out there. I tried to be upbeat, keep her positive, protect her. But people were mean to her. Eventually, she just curdled to our life. To me, too, I guess. I don’t blame her. None of it was her fault.”

Before tonight, Ruth had always presumed that Dad couldn’t see it, the way people in St. Louis had treated Mama. Because he’d grown up there, because Missouri was what he was used to, because maybe he was in a little bit of denial about who Mama really was. And maybe Ruth had also given him a pass because Mama was not an easy woman. She was funny and smart and lovable, sure. But she was also arrogant, vain, too aware of her own beauty. She was quick-tempered, haughty, demanding, irritable. Ruth knew all of this to be true. But maybe Ruth had also given her father a pass simply because he was her dad. And she loved him.

So the notion that he had been aware of the hostilities, but hadn’t been able to help… that notion was new to Ruth. And now she realized there’d been a certain comfort in presuming her father was merely oblivious. The alternative… Ruth shifted in her seat. She could see his remorse. But he’d chosen this, it occurred to her for the first time.

“You took us there,” she said softly.

It wasn’t an accusation. It was just a statement of observation, and Ruth said it out loud the very moment it occurred to her. Dad winced nonetheless. Perhaps she expected him to produce a list of reasons, his family, the job, the schools, the quality of life. But instead, he was quiet. They both were, remembering.

For Ruth, it was the country club, the manager with the pink eyelids, the locker in the staff room. She could only guess which memories might present themselves to her father. His regrets were private. But he knew them intimately.

And so his next words were not an excuse, Ruth understood. They were a truth, softly spoken.

“I just didn’t realize,” he said.

Ruth would think back to this moment frequently in the months ahead, her father’s admission, his broken proclamation of love, the torment all over his face. The words he didn’t say, perhaps wasn’t able to say. She would ponder this memory without quite knowing why it lingered so haphazardly in her mind. Something in the mystery of her father’s unspoken regrets. His rangy, comprehensive, unapologetic, imperishable love for Mama. And his deep, uncomplicated contentment now, with someone who wasn’t her. The questions all this engendered about the qualities and varieties of love. Who felt most like home? What kind of happiness mattered most?

Because like her father, Ruth would fall in love once. And then twice. Like her father, she’d tell herself that one thing had nothing to do with the other. The great difference of course was that Ruth’s two great and disparate loves would overlap, would swarm and crowd her heart. The entanglement would contain all the hallmarks of a heist: velocity, misdirection, duplicity, unimaginable payoff. Ruth, like most anyone who’s ever fallen in love, would fail to appreciate that she was felon and victim, both.

When Ruth returned to her dorm late that night, she peeled off her clothes and pulled a nightgown over her head. As an upper classman now, this was the first semester she’d have her own room, the luxury of her own sink and toilet. In her private half bath, she switched on the light and lifted the lid of the toilet. Taped there, on the underside of the toilet lid was a close-up of a smiling George Washington, a message in her father’s distinctive script. You go, girl!