In other words, she wanted to bear Nestor’s child.

Chapter THIRTY-TWO

Altogether, though the northeast Bronx was not exactly Havana, María found it a pleasant thing to be living with a family again, no matter that the apartment was a fifth-floor railroad walk-up off Allerton Avenue with scarcely any privacy, even if they had given María one of their five kids’ bedrooms. Treated as a special guest by Gladys’s sister, María had no reason to complain about anything, and though she spoke no more than a few words of English, when they were taken around the neighborhood-de los italianos-to their churches, markets, and butcher shops, she was delighted to find that she could speak Spanish and still be understood. María liked that. She spent an afternoon at the Bronx Zoo, which was not far away, and another in the company of Mireya down in the heart of Manhattan, with strolls through Central Park, so much vaster and labyrinthine than any park in Havana; there were excursions to see Macy’s department store and the Empires [sic] State Building-tense and trying to make a joke, María asked: “So where is King Kong?”-and a quick visit to the clothing factory off Seventh Avenue and Thirty-eighth where Mireya’s husband worked as an English-Spanish-speaking floor manager and the owner, a Jewish fellow, laying eyes on María, instantly offered her a job as a foundation garment model. Even after a stroll one night through a neon-lit Times Square, where they had dined for nickels in a Horn & Hardart (whose lemon meringue pie-dispensing machines fascinated her), María had found the city barely tolerable, and not anyplace she could imagine living, with or without Nestor. The noisy and unsettling subway rides from the Bronx alone seemed tedious, and more than once, though María tried to keep to herself, her guarded ways still hadn’t prevented some of those men from reaching out to grasp her nalgitas or to press up against her. And downtown, as it had been in Havana, she experienced the same, men stopping everywhere to stare at her, and while no one treated her badly, María tired quickly of the city-the mad traffic, the teeming sidewalks, the endless buzz of hearing not just English but half a dozen other languages as she walked along, sashaying from corner to corner, her head raised, gawking at the skyscrapers and, often enough, longing for the quieter and more quaint arcades of Havana, the blueness of the Cuban sky.

In that time, she did make an effort to contact a few club managers. Indeed an agent, an affable Cuban transplant named Johnny Tamayo, had taken María around one afternoon, and she had auditioned, in her most lustrous costume, for a possible future engagement as one of the “sexquisite” dancers at the Latin Quarter, where the actress Mae West, supported by a cast of oiled up musclemen, happened to be the featured star of a somewhat bawdy revue that month. María also turned up at La Conga and the Copacabana, but in each instance, because she was so ill equipped to navigate her way through the intricacies of the English language and feeling out of her element, her performances were so halfhearted that María came off as if she didn’t really care if they hired her or not. This, in fact, happened to be the truth.

One late afternoon, however, on her fifth day in the city, when she couldn’t take waiting anymore, María went down to the first-floor lobby, where a pay phone had been installed for the poorer tenants of the building and, dropping a nickel in, dialed the number that Nestor had given her. Three rings, and someone picked up: “ Claremont ’s Pharmacy.” And because she could hardly speak English, it didn’t take long before the red-haired Irish fellow who’d answered the call put her on the phone with the Puerto Rican cook working behind their soda fountain counter, and it was he, Fernando, who later sent a kid up the street to Nestor Castillo’s apartment with a message from “Omar of Havana” along with that number in the Bronx.

THEY FINALLY SPOKE A FEW HOURS LATER, WHEN NESTOR, SLIPPING out of his apartment on the pretext of buying a pack of cigarettes, had walked over to the Shamrock, a block away, to use their pay phone. For her part, while awaiting Nestor’s call, María had sat restlessly with Gladys’s family in their living room, listening to the Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians hour on the radio. As it happened, just as their landlord’s teenage boy came knocking on the door of Apartment 22 with a message that someone had called the building asking to speak to the lady staying with the Delgados, Mr. Lombardo, his selections depending on the latest trends, led his orchestra into a lavish rendition of a certain newly popular song. Since everyone in that building, mostly Italians, listened to that radio program at the same time, the hallways and courtyard echoed, and mockingly so-te juro-with the melody of that current hit “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

The kid had left the telephone receiver dangling.

“Sí?”

“Hola, María…?”

“Nestor?”

It had been so long since she last heard his voice that she was surprised.

“Is it you, María?”

“But you know it is, mi amor. Are you well?”

“I am…well enough, pero, María…”

“Tell me everything, mi corazón… Have you thought about me?”

“Every day since I have been in this country…”

She heard a puzzling sound behind her-two little girls bouncing a ball back and forth at the far end of the hallway, playing just like she and her dead sister, Teresita, used to. María shushed them. Just as distracting was the manner in which their voices, separated by a sea of seven years, though familiar, seemed to belong to strangers: Nestor’s had grown deeper, and though he still had an affectionate tone, he spoke slowly, and not as gushingly as he used to, as if he were guarding something. And María’s-she knew it herself-was devoid of the absolute sweetness that had once informed every syllable she uttered; that voice, formerly so angelic, now had the edge of a more world-weary woman of twenty-six.

“It was the same for me, Nestor… I’ve missed you,” she told him. And when he didn’t answer right away, she added: “I’ve missed you so much that my heart has aches to think about it.”

She heard him sigh, heard the murmurs of voices, the click-clacking of a game of pool, and, from the upper recesses of the building, the strains of that song again. That’s when he asked her: “How long will you be here in New York?”

“I don’t know, maybe a week. I haven’t bought any tickets back yet. I don’t really know anything, right now, but, Nestor, I came here to see you. You remember that, don’t you?” Then: “Please don’t tell me I’ve come all this way for nothing.”

“No, no, María, you haven’t, I promise you that. It’s just that things are not so easy for me as when you and I were together. It’s that-”

But before he could continue, she told him: “Just tell me where and when we can meet, my love.”

He gave it some thought, and perhaps because he didn’t think it a good idea to meet with María anyplace uptown, where they might be seen, he suggested a place reminiscent of where they sometimes went on Sundays back in Havana, not to the bedroom of a friend’s solar, or to one of those couples’ retreats rented by the hours, but to a sanctimonious place that somehow always made them both feel good: a church.

“Please don’t think me crazy, María,” he said after a few moments. “But have you heard of a very special iglesia, downtown-it’s called St. Patrick’s-on Fifty and Fifth?”

“Yes, I have,” she told him. Gladys’s sister had pointed it out to her from a bus.

“Good,” he said. “It’s a very nice church. We can meet there, by the entranceway, yes?”

“But when, Nestor?”

“How is the day after tomorrow? At two o’clock. ¿Está bien?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can stroll around for a bit, but mainly we will get the chance to talk, okay?”