Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman [best story books to read .txt] 📗

next to her, in her wheelchair, smiling at me with her lips together, making her cute axolotl face. She always gets her hair done when she knows I’m coming, and it’s arrayed over her head in ringlets that resemble threadbare reddish-orange Christmas ribbons. I bend to kiss her pale cheek and show her the tin of cookies and ask about Susan Cornwall. Danielle says that she was taken to the hospital for some routine tests. I set the cookies down on the sill by Mamita’s window, alongside the framed photographs there; that one with my mother and sister and Bert with cardboard taped over his face, I remember now, was taken at Yolandita’s wedding with Richard the Vietnam vet and Sears manager. When we speak over the telephone, does Mamita visualize me as I am now or as I was when I was a boy? Leaving the bathroom door open to give herself room to maneuver, Danielle expertly lifts Mamita from her wheelchair onto the toilet, and I step out into the corridor to wait. The day will come when either my mother or Susan Cornwall will outlive her nemesis and find herself sharing a room with an empty bed and a cleaned-out closet, until a new roommate is moved in and a new name tag is put up. The survivor won’t feel a twinge of grief but instead will feel like a soldier numbed by a long war. Lexi once told me that Susan Cornwall never receives visitors, that her only son lives in Wisconsin and hasn’t come to see her in five years.

Mamita, I ask her, what was the name of that boardinghouse you and Dolores Ojito lived in? It’s like restarting the same conversation we had last visit. She’d told me the name. I’d even written it down, but I lost that notebook; so often they fall from my pocket. She must have moved into the boardinghouse during the spring of 1952, because that’s when Doroteo Guamuch Flores won the Boston marathon, and I know Abuelita was up here with Mamita, because she always liked telling about how together from somewhere along the course they’d cheered their compatriot on.

My mother’s gaze withdraws back in time, her rust-hued lashes quiveringly lowered. Our Lady Gih … gih … she stammers, Ay no, Frankie, no se. Then she quietly pronounces as if under a spell: Our Lady’s Guild House. That’s it, I’ve looked it up before, a rooming house attached to a convent of cloistered nuns, the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, still in operation, a brick-and-granite building on an exposed corner of Charlesgate Road and the Pike, only blocks from the Berklee College of Music, where my mother would spend the last fifteen years or so of her working life.

Mamita, isn’t it true that you were distinguished professor of marimba at Berklee.

Ay, hijo, and laughter trills out of her, her soft body shaking in her wheelchair. As a son, I have countless failings, but I’ve always been good at making Mamita laugh.

Back when she was a Guatemalan working girl in Boston, a bilingual secretary, in her twenties, boarding at Our Lady’s, what would she have thought if she could have glimpsed her future, a professor at Berklee, teaching Spanish, not marimba, to some of the world’s most gifted student musicians? Would it have seemed the fulfillment of a dream or did she dream of something else? Now, even mundane questions can seem to task her mind the way a perplexing riddle might, and her eyes flood with anxiety.

You don’t remember what your dream for the future was back then, Mami?

No, Frankie, she says firmly, I don’t. I’ve also noticed how her anxiety eases whenever she can respond to a question with an answer she feels sure of.

You were just happy to be in Boston, probably, I say. Having fun, you and Dolores Ojito going out on dates with those Harvard foreign grad school muchachos, Zbiggy Brzezinski, no less, right Mami?

That makes her smile. One evening when I was home from college and we were watching the news on the portable TV in the kitchen, President Carter introducing new members of his cabinet, my mother’s eyes went wide and she exclaimed, Zbiggy! She knew him from her single working-girl days in Boston, it turned out, when she used to get invited to foreign grad student parties. After one of those parties, Zbigniew Brzezinski had carried her in his arms across a muddy Harvard yard. I asked her what he was like and she responded: Zbiggy was like a lion! Liiii-yun, she pronounced it.

Ay, Mamita, how did a niña bien from the tropics like you ever end up in a joint like this? That’s another of our routines. Whenever I visit her at Green Meadows, I ask her that, and she always answers the same way: Ay, no sé, hijo, and that deep giggle that rolls on into helpless yelps of laughter.

From grade school through high school, Mamita attended Guatemala’s first bilingual school, the all-girl Colegio Inglés Americano. At home she had a pet spider monkey named Coco whom she spoke to only in English, so that by the time she was ten she could translate for American customers who came into her parents’ stores. One morning Mamita found Coco curled up in a corner of the patio, his head slumped forward with a coffee cup wedged over it. Coco, awaken! she commanded in her Inglés Americano English. This is not amusing! Her monkey’s accidental death by suffocation so affected her that even a year later, whenever anyone asked, What’s new, Yoli? she’d respond, Coco died. He no longer exists. That’s why, she told Lexi and me, she never allowed herself to become attached to our pets. It’s true my mother never liked our pets. Fritzie was sent away to live in Maine, and within days of our having moved into the new house on Wooded Hollow Road, furnished with brand-new furniture and powder-blue carpeting, Beaker, half-beagle, half-cocker