My Beloved World Part 11

At some point I introduced Kevin to Abuelita, which made the relations.h.i.+p official. From then on it was taken for granted that we would get married. Whatever the differences between Puerto Ricans and Irish, among our friends and families a common expectation prevailed: you married your first sweetheart. The only question was whether we would do it right after high school or wait till we finished college.

I REMEMBER STANDING at the bedroom window. Beyond the parking structure, at the corner of the empty lot where junk was strewn among the weeds, I could see Kevin's Dodge, his skinny legs stretching from under the cha.s.sis. An a.s.sortment of parts and tools were laid out carefully on the sidewalk beside him. The engine had recently taken its last gasp, and he was swapping it out for one that he'd bought at a salvage shop. Much closer, on the basketball court below, there was Junior alone with the ball, doing his endless private dance.

Mami came into the room and stood beside me. She saw what I saw and laid a hand gently on my shoulder. "My two sons," she said.

CHAPTER Thirteen

Cerveza Schaefer es la mejor cuando se toma mas de una ...*

Kenny Moy was sitting next to t.i.ti Aurora in front of the TV, belting out the beer jingle. That was pretty much the extent of his Spanish, but it didn't prevent him from bonding with t.i.ti Aurora. They conducted bizarrely bilingual conversations while watching pro wrestling together. t.i.ti would be bobbing up and down, screaming at the referee, cheering on her favorite of the day. I loved to watch her: wrestling was the only thing that made her loosen up and enjoy herself. It reminded me of Papi's periodic emergence from his mournful silence to root for the Yankees on Abuelita's little black-and-white TV. But the Sheik? The Crusher? Killer Kowalski? Gorilla Monsoon? How could t.i.ti believe this was for real?

Ken Moy was the student coach of the girls' team of the Forensics Club at Cardinal Spellman. I signed up as part of my self-imposed preprofessional program in public speaking, which advanced whenever an opportunity presented itself. The dozen or so girls on the team were an especially interesting bunch of self-selected high-functioning nerds, and Kenny coached us in debate and extemporaneous speech. He was brilliant at debate. His mind was an a.n.a.lytic machine that could dismantle an opponent's position, step by inexorable step. His affirmative arguments would make a concrete bunker look like a house of cards. And he was utterly untainted by emotion. I aspired to Ken's unflappable, rational cool, though I feared that I came across more like t.i.ti Gloria in the usual nervous tizzy that accompanied her every mundane decision-red dress or blue?

"Sonia, I don't care if you have to cut off your hands, get that gesture out of your G.o.dd.a.m.n repertoire!" That was Kenny ringside. Tell a Puerto Rican not to talk with her hands? Ask a bird not to fly.

Ken should have gone to Bronx Science, but his mother made him come to Cardinal Spellman to keep an eye on his sister. Janet was a radical individualist with a completely uncensored approach to the world, a ticking time bomb in a Catholic school. She even cursed the princ.i.p.al to his face in the cafeteria when he caught her holding hands with her boyfriend. Ken had to tax his mighty rhetorical powers to win her a reprieve. But the truth was that if Janet had been expelled, Ken would have left too, and the school would have lost a star pupil.

They lived in East Harlem, where their parents ran a Chinese hand laundry. I never visited Ken's home or met his parents. His dad was trouble three ways, he said-heroin, gambling, and a violent temper-and since they lived almost an hour away by subway, we hung out at my place. Ken claimed they were the only Chinese family in the barrio, and he was a barrio kid through and through, slamming down dominoes with the best of them. He was skinny as a knife blade, but he could eat more of Mami's rice and beans and chuletas in one sitting than the rest of us together.

In philosophy cla.s.s, we were studying logic. I'm not sure what I expected of philosophy, but formal logic took me by surprise. I loved it. I perceived beauty in it, the idea of an order that held under any circ.u.mstances. What excited me most was how I could immediately apply it down the hall in debate practice. I was amazed that something so mathematically pure and abstract could transform into human persuasion, into words with the power to change people's minds.

Forensics Club was good training for a lawyer in ways that I barely understood at the time. You got handed a topic, as well as the side you had to argue, pro or con. It didn't matter what you believed about the issue; what mattered was how well you argued. You not only had to see both sides; you had to prepare as if you were arguing both in order to antic.i.p.ate your opponent's moves. In your allotted five minutes, you had to use language carefully to paint a picture for those who would decide the match. Then you had to listen. "Half a debate is listening to what the other person says," Ken advised. It was easy to present your own points, much harder to listen well enough to respond effectively to your opponent.

Listening was second nature to me. My friends confided in me, unloaded their problems, and leaned on me for advice, the same way my mother's friends leaned on her. When I was little, listening and watching for cues had seemed like the key to survival in a precarious world. I notice when people hesitate or get defensive, when they care more about what they're saying than they'll admit, or when they're too quick about brus.h.i.+ng something off. So much is communicated in tone of voice, in subtleties of expression, and in body language.

What Ken taught us was a different way of listening, more formal than my own intuitive skill. He taught us to pay attention for the vulnerable links in a chain of logic, the faulty a.s.sumptions and the supposed facts that you know you can challenge when your turn comes. But even as I absorbed Ken's logical strategies, I knew instinctively that emotion doesn't disappear. Much as you had to keep your own in check, there was still that of your listeners to consider. A line of reasoning could persuade, but so could a sequence of feelings. Constructing a chain of logic was one thing; building a chain of emotions required a different understanding.

I'VE MADE IT to the finals of the extemporaneous speech compet.i.tion. The timer starts, and I pick a slip of paper blindly. Three topics based on current events: choose one. I have fifteen minutes to brainstorm and organize a five- to seven-minute speech. Two of the three are so loud with the din of the nightly news-outrage at My Lai, the killings at Kent State, the war spreading across borders, the protests spreading across campuses-that it's hard to hear myself think. The third topic catches my eye: the cold-blooded murder of Kitty Genovese and the neighbors who witnessed it but did nothing. Closer to home-Queens instead of Cambodia-and it touches a nerve.

The clock is running. What can I recall of the news reports? Where do I want to take this? What's my purpose? What's the best point of entry? I'll start by painting a picture ... and remember to keep my hands still.

"On a cold night in early spring, six years ago, a young woman drove home from the bar where she was working to her apartment in Queens. It was around 3:00 a.m. She parked her car in a nearby parking lot and was walking up the alley toward her building when a stranger appeared out of the shadows and approached her. Frightened, she ran, but he caught up with her. He stabbed her in the back. She screamed and cried for help. Several neighbors heard her cries and the struggle that ensued as Winston Moseley a.s.saulted Kitty Genovese."

I look out and observe a rapt stillness in the room. I've got them.

"But the night was cold, and windows were closed. Those who heard thought it was probably just a lovers' quarrel or a couple of drunks getting rowdy. Kitty Genovese screamed and screamed for help as her a.s.sailant punched her and beat her over the head, stabbed her repeatedly, and bruised her all over her body. Finally, he raped her as she lay dying. When it was all over, one of the neighbors called the police. They arrived within minutes, but Kitty Genovese died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

"Winston Moseley got away that night. He was apprehended later on a burglary charge and confessed to the murder. He's locked up for life. That's not what I'm concerned with today. No, what concerns me is this: Thirty-eight neighbors also confessed. Each one of them heard or witnessed some part of the attack, which lasted over half an hour. Thirty-eight neighbors did nothing to intervene. They looked on and let this young woman die a horrible death."

When I pause to look at the faces before me, I see an opening: These are the bystanders, I imagine, sitting right here in the auditorium. How do I get past whatever it is that paralyzes them? How do I get them to step up and take responsibility?

"Thirty-eight neighbors did nothing. How does this happen? It happens when we become apathetic about our roles in society. It happens when we forget that we are a community, that we are connected to one another and have an obligation to engage with other human beings." Okay, I have to unpack this a bit, cover the bases, then circle back. "A crime like what happened to Kitty Genovese may be the act of a deranged individual. Other crimes may be different in their causes, pointing to broader failures of society. But in the moment of opportunity, when a criminal grabs his chance and a victim is suffering, our own responsibility is the same. When the criminal finds his victim in a dark alley, an observer too has a moment of opportunity. Will you see the victim not as a stranger or a statistic but as another human being like yourself? Will you be fully human in that moment and feel the obligation to care, to act, to get involved? Will you be fully a citizen and rise to the responsibility?"

They're still with me, every one of them. So I start to sum up and come in for a landing ... "There was a young woman at the threshold of her life, a budding flower ready to open." And there's my hand, almost as if it doesn't belong to me, the fingers cupped and opening in bloom, then closing to a hard fist: "We destroyed that flower."

The applause carries me down the steps. Ken is grinning broadly, proudly. They announce that I've won first prize! A little c.o.c.ky, I tell Ken that sometimes talking with your hands is fine. It's who I am, where I come from.

I WAS DOING my homework at the kitchen table and Junior was doing his, as usual, in front of the TV, when the door opened. Mami made a dramatic entrance, slamming the stack of books in her arms straight down on the floor.

"I'm not going back!" she announced, her voice trembling. "It's too much for me. I'm sorry, I can't do it."

"Junior, get in here!" I yelled. He appeared in the doorway instantly. "If you can't do it, Mami, then we can't either. Take a break, Junior, no more school for us." With both hands I snapped shut the textbook I was reading-a very satisfying sound. I did glance at the page number first, though.

This mutiny was incited only a few months after my mother had sat Junior and me down at that same kitchen table and asked whether we would be willing to make some sacrifices so that she could study to qualify as a registered nurse. She had wanted years before to continue her schooling, but that hope was dashed when Papi died. Over time, the salary she earned as a practical nurse lagged further and further behind what registered nurses were earning. She was worried that with her Social Security survivors' benefits ending when Junior and I finished school, she wouldn't be able to manage on her own. She certainly didn't want to lean on us to support her. We would have to tighten our belts for a while, while she took leave from the hospital to attend school.

The money was not an insurmountable problem. My mother took a Sat.u.r.day s.h.i.+ft at a methadone clinic to make up a bit of lost income. I had worked the previous summer in the business office at Prospect Hospital, and they let me continue on weekends during the school year. Junior was working at Prospect too, in reception, and he had a second job as a sacristan at St. Patrick's Cathedral. All the little pieces added up.

No, the problem was not money. The problem was that my mother was scared out of her wits. Never mind that she was one very intelligent and ambitious woman. Never mind that Hostos Community College, where she enrolled, was specially created to serve the South Bronx Latino community with a bilingual program for students like my mother. Never mind that she had done the work of a registered nurse unofficially for years, if only because Prospect Hospital was so tiny, and she was so well trusted there. Never mind even that she had nursed half the residents of Hunts Point, Bronxdale, and Co-op City at one point or another. Do I exaggerate? Not much.

My mother was tortured by lack of confidence in her own mental ability. She was especially terrified as soon as anything could be labeled a math problem, instead of just a matter of calculating a dosage. The word "quiz" was to her a stun gun. Most of the time, she beat back her fear with furious effort. She would crack the books as soon as she walked in the door, and midnight would find her still studying. Occasionally, though, anxiety got the better of her, and it was then that a bit of reverse psychology-some might say emotional blackmail-was in order. The idea that Junior and I might quit too, however improbable, was far more terrifying than any quiz.

Seeing my mother get back to her studies was all the proof I needed that a chain of emotion can persuade when one forged of logic won't hold. But more important was her example that a surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence. It was something I would remember often in years ahead, whenever faced with fears that I wasn't smart enough to succeed.

* "Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one"

CHAPTER Fourteen

AS MUCH AS I aspired to Kenny's cool, dispa.s.sionate rationality, Love Story succeeded in sucking me in, along with every other high school girl in America. But there was something on the screen that mesmerized me even more than the heart-tugging story of Ali MacGraw's sickness or Ryan O'Neal's blue eyes. The college campus where the movie was set, supposedly Harvard, seemed a wonderland. Set among pristine snowy fields, here was a cathedral of learning whose denizens lived out what seemed like an antiquarian fantasy, debating under pointy arches, scaling book-lined walls, and lounging on leather couches. Apart from Camden, New Jersey, and the alternate reality of Puerto Rico, I had never traveled far from the Bronx, and I had certainly never seen anything like this. If I had known then that many scenes of Love Story were actually filmed at Fordham University in the borough where we lived, my future might have turned out very differently.

Until those darkened hours in a movie theater, I hadn't given much thought to what life at college might be like or how it might be different from high school. Then, in the fall of my senior year, the phone rang. It was Kenny, the familiar deep, steady voice calling long-distance from Princeton, where he was a freshman. As he fed coins into the box every few minutes, he described the strange new world he was navigating. He advised me that it was time for me too to be thinking about applying to college, and one thing he said sticks clearly in my memory, because I had no idea what he meant: "Try for the Ivy League." Ken was the first student we knew from Spellman ever to have crossed into that world, and it wasn't a term that had ever come up in conversation. He explained that this was the finest college education available and that it would open every door, which sounded oddly like a more knowing version of Mami's claim for higher education generally. I jotted down the names of the colleges as he rattled them off, tossing in Stanford for good measure.

The next day the guidance counselor had only one question as she was thumbing through the thick catalog she'd taken down from the shelf: "Have you thought about Fordham?" A couple of pages of the book were devoted to each college: a mission statement in blandly aspirational code, a few statistics, generic black-and-white photographs of students looking earnestly engaged. When I said no to Fordham, she offered the names of several more Catholic colleges.

I told her that I wasn't really interested in parochial colleges; I wanted to apply to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford ...

She looked at me. "Okay." And that was the extent of her guidance. This was an occasion when it would never have occurred to me to ask for advice. At a Catholic high school that served the kids of Irish and Italian immigrants, a focus on parochial colleges made perfect sense: just getting into college was already more than most students' parents had accomplished. I happened to be graduating on the cusp of a change that would soon see many of Spellman's students going on to the most highly compet.i.tive schools. But that fall, Kenny Moy at Princeton was pretty much the first Spellman student to walk on the moon.

I got the application forms and wrote my essays, scribbling in the dark with not a clue as to what might be a worthy subject or how to shape such a thing. I tackled the SAT in much the same way. The brochure that came with the registration form was the only hint I had of what to expect on the test. Anyway, I could not have afforded a prep course, even if I'd known there was such a thing.

It is hard for students today to imagine the void before the Internet and how common my navete was at the time. If you attended an elite prep school, no doubt there was valuable information swirling in the air, impossible not to inhale. And obviously, those applicants whose parents had attended the same college had access to insider knowledge, to say nothing of eligibility for legacy admissions. If your own parents had gone to college at all, they still had some firsthand experience to draw on. The rest of us, for the most part, just blundered into it.

Qualifying for financial aid was the easiest part. With my mother enrolled at Hostos Community College at the time, we were living mainly on the Social Security survivors' benefits, supplemented slightly by Mami's part-time work at the methadone clinic, her summer pay at Prospect Hospital, and the little that Junior and I contributed from our part-time and summer jobs. There were no a.s.sets to report. None of us even had a bank account. On paydays I would walk five blocks from Prospect Hospital to the check-cas.h.i.+ng place near the train station to cash my paycheck, just as my mother had always done, just as the rest of the staff at the hospital did. To pay the phone bill, you could get a money order there too. Cash was good enough for everything else.

It's just as well I had no idea how selective the colleges I was applying to were. If I had known, I might have hesitated. I did understand enough to hedge my bets, though: CUNY could serve as my safety school, since it was public admission. Among the alternatives, I figured it likeliest I would end up at the state university at Stony Brook, at which Kevin was aiming. I had quickly given up on Stanford as being too far away. Flying cross-country to have a look would have already cost more than I could afford, never mind coming home for Christmas.