At the funeral a black woman sang a gospel song. Her voice was powerful and moving. It shook the whole church and made everyone who was crying cry even more. She was the only black person in the building.
My cousin Nicky told me that my grandfather used to sleep with her now and then. This I found hard to accept. The notion of Grandpa Gus having sex with anyone at all was difficult for me, so the idea that he slept with this black woman was downright unfathomable. The woman was at least twenty years younger than my grandpa and for as long as I could remember, the man had nothing good to say about any black person outside of Nat King Cole and Willie Mays.
Nicky told me that the woman was a customer in my grandpa’s store and that her husband had died in Vietnam. Gramps let her open an account for her groceries, which was something he very rarely did. He also allowed her to call in for her orders (another rarity) and would make her deliveries personally. Thus began a love affair that lasted seven or eight years, or so the story goes.
The truth of the romance has never been completely confirmed. But on that Astorian August morning the woman sang her guts out. She put every possible ounce of feeling into the stirring melody. She must have felt something for the man.
My mother gave her a big hug after the service. My mother gave everybody a big hug after the service. It was like she was trying to extract pieces of my grandfather’s spirit out of everyone who knew him. Like if she squeezed everyone hard enough it would somehow reconstitute his being and he would rematerialize alive and well before us.
I miss him. I loved him a lot. It was already a rough summer for me but my concern for my mother outweighed my grief. She was getting high more often and I was scared she would OD and kill herself or wind up in a psych ward somewhere. For the first two weeks after my grandfather’s death it looked like one or the other was inevitable.
I stayed home as much as I could without going batshit myself. She didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything so I made us sandwiches for lunch every afternoon and more sandwiches for dinner every evening. I am not much of cook. The lunch sandwich would be her breakfast because she slept till two in the afternoon every day. Just in time to turn on the TV and catch her soap operas. The TV would remain on till she passed out in the wee hours. If I woke up during the night I’d turn it off, but very often it stayed on until I rose the next morning.
It was heavy and oppressive being alone with her every day. It was also hot as all fuck. The air conditioner was broken and she was way too out of it to care. She was sliding down a nasty slope of addiction and depression and there was nothing I could do about it.
At least once a day she would be sitting in front of the TV watching General Hospital or some shit and tears would just roll down her face. Big watery tears that left trails of dirt and makeup as they made their way south. The weird thing was that she didn’t really look sad. She was blank, no expression, nothing in her face giving away any grief or pain. This unnerved me more than if she were overcome by a loud jag of sobs and crying. I wished she would moan and wail like a normal human being instead of the empty zombified shell she’d become. I was not equipped to deal with her and she’d stopped letting anyone at all, family or friend, into the house.
And then one day around the middle of August I woke up to the sound of our vacuum cleaner. It had been silent for months. My mother had gotten up early and was giving the house a thorough cleaning. She looked different that day, she was smiling at me but not in a dopey narcotic way. It was a lucid and peaceful smile. Her hair was combed and her clothes weren’t wrinkled. She kissed me good morning and cooked me breakfast in a clean kitchen.
It seemed like she had picked herself up by the bootstraps, snapped out of despair, and made a decision not to let it all go down the drain. That afternoon she started packing things into suitcases and boxes. I didn’t ask why. When we sat down to lunch (she made chili with Minute rice—my favorite) she told me that we were going to move into the city.
She may as well have said that we were moving to North Dakota. If you lived in Jackson Heights, Manhattan was that far away. Maybe we would go once or twice a year to see the Christmas tree or the circus. Or if my cousins came up from Florida we would go to the Empire State Building. But not much more than that. And living there . . . well, that was uncharted waters. The city was for rich people or poor people and we didn’t fall into either category.
five
My grandfather had a lot more money than I’d imagined. He took numbers in his shop and made loans to his customers for decades. There were piles and piles of cash in a safe he kept in the basement of his house. The lion’s
