Fire in the Ashes (23 page)

On September 5, 2009, I was in Washington National Airport waiting for a plane to Boston.

Text message on my cell: “Happy birthday, Jonathan! Hope you weren’t too lonely, far away from home. Miss you a lot. College starts in ten more days. Talk soon. XOXOXOX, Pineapple.”

Two weeks later: an e-mail from Pineapple. “Hey Jonathan! Back at college. Here are the classes that I’m taking this semester. Anthropology (Non-western Worlds). We’re studying Nigeria and its different cultures. Also taking Intro to Psychology and in this class I’m learning of the workings of the mind and our behaviors. I’m also in a dance class, which I’d like to say is just because I need a daily workout. And I’m in a singing class to improve my voice. I also have an English class, plus tutorial in writing since you know that this has been my weakness.

“I want to thank you and your assistant for sending
me a laptop. I’m able now to type my papers on my own time and not have to count on the computers in the library, which closes way too early.…”

September 30: “Hey Jonathan! I heard you’re coming to Rhode Island next month for a lecture. Can we do lunch while you’re here?”

October 20: She and Lara met me in the lobby of a much-too-fancy old hotel where my hosts in Providence had put me up the night before. I found them sitting on a sofa near the registration desk, looking around them at the huge bouquets of flowers on the tables and an imposing chandelier that hung down from the ceiling.

The hotel had a dining room, a little on the formal side, with dark wood panels and deep leather chairs; but it wasn’t crowded and the waitress led us to a semiprivate booth that looked out on a courtyard. I worried that the two of them, whose financial situation didn’t ordinarily allow them many luxuries, might feel ill at ease in this elaborate setting; but this was a needless worry. They seemed relaxed and comfortable and were looking through their menus before I opened mine.

They ordered shrimp and scallops with linguine. When the waitress asked what they would like to drink, they asked for passion fruit and mango juice with lime, which sounded awfully sweet to me but which Lara recommended, so I ordered it as well.

They asked me if I liked it.

“Very good. Something new to me,” I said.

“It’s good for you to try new things,” Pineapple said.

At one moment during lunch she noticed that there was an ink stain on my shirt where I’d put a black pen in my pocket, but without the top attached. She leaned across the table so that she could take the fabric in her hands. “It’s going to be hard to get that out. You need to be more careful.”

After we’d eaten, we stayed there for an hour. It turned out they had waited until now to bring up something serious that was weighing on their minds. Pineapple told me that the immigration service, for reasons neither of them knew, had denied their father’s application for renewal of his green card. If this ruling couldn’t be reversed, it would terminate his status as a legal immigrant.
A lawyer in Providence was helping him to file an appeal.

In the interim, he could not continue working in the restaurant of the hotel, which could no longer legally employ him. Compounding the difficulties that the family now would face, their mother had been laid off from the job she had enjoyed, working with the elderly, and had since been working as a housekeeper at one of the chain motels.

“She’s struggling,” Lara said. “She’s on her knees, scrubbing floors, working full-time-plus.” This was all the harder, she explained, because her mother, although she was only forty-two, had premature arthritis. “She can barely make a fist, but the hotel has this rule. You’re not allowed to use a mop to clean the floors. You have to get down on your knees and scrub the bathroom tiles with a cloth.” Her mother, she said, was also getting stomach pains and headaches, which may have been occasioned by her nervousness about their father’s situation.

Both girls told me they were praying for their mother and their father. Both said they believed in God, but, as they explained this, in rather different ways. Lara said that she considered herself Catholic, but she added that she had no close attachment to “any special church” and went to “different churches” with her friends from college. She hadn’t found one yet “that fits with my beliefs, where I feel that I belong.”

Pineapple did not go to church at all. She told me that she prayed but did not believe in God “as somebody like Jesus—I mean, like a person”—but as “something like a
power,” “something good,” “something that protects you and looks over you.” She said that when she spoke of God, however, “I keep on saying ‘him’ or ‘he’—you know? As if it was my father or grandfather.”

They had to leave at 3:00 p.m. because Pineapple had a seminar at four. Lara decided they should take a taxi in order to be sure Pineapple wasn’t late for class. The doorman stepped out on the street and whistled at the line of cabs. Before I could think of it, Lara handed him a tip. “Thank you for lunch,” Pineapple said. Poised and polite, they got into the taxi and headed back to school.

Virgilio’s attorney, as I had expected, had no success with his appeal. Pineapple told me, just before Thanksgiving, that he would be leaving in another week to return to Guatemala. Their mother would remain behind to provide a home for Miguel and Mosquito. She and Lara, living in their college dorms, would carry on as they had done before. Their tuition, room and board, and related college costs would continue to be met by their financial packages and the help they were receiving from the people at the church. And they still were earning money from the jobs they did under their work-study grants, some of which they said that they would try to use to help their mother.

If their mother should decide at a later time to follow her husband back to Guatemala, Lara and Pineapple said they had found out they could be their brother’s legal guardians, if their parents would agree, so that he could keep on at his school here in Rhode Island. Lara was in her senior year and would graduate in the spring. She wanted to go on and obtain a graduate degree in order to be certified as a classroom teacher. “But if it’s just impossible,” she said, “I would put it off a year, or maybe two years, so that I could
work full-time” and earn enough to function as a back-up for the other members of the family.

After Virgilio left for Guatemala, Pineapple told me that he phoned them or their mother almost every night. Even at a distance, his affectionate protectiveness continued to be comforting, a steady source of consolation for the miles and the border that divided them. Some of the people in Rhode Island, nonetheless, were very harsh in speaking of Virgilio, according to Pineapple. They had not believed him when he said his green card had been non-renewed, or else condemned him retroactively for not taking measures to prevent its cancellation, which they regarded as an indication that he was neglectful in caring for his family.

Pineapple and Lara defended him with fierceness. Lara made the observation that many otherwise enlightened people in the white community tended to be sympathetic to the mothers of black and Hispanic children, but looked upon the fathers, almost automatically, through a lens of stereotype, as lacking in responsibility. These assumptions, Lara said, according to a book she’d read the year before, “have deep roots in history.”

February 21, 2010: Mosquito, who was in her final year of high school and would graduate in May in almost the same week as Lara’s college graduation, sent me an e-mail about the college that she planned to go to. She had been awarded a financial package of $40,000 by a private college in Connecticut of which I knew very little other than the fact that it was widely known for its athletic programs, but less so, as a friend informed me, for its purely academic offerings.

I wrote to her, “I know I have no right butting in,” but I said that, with her nearly perfect academic record, I thought she ought to think this through a little more before she came to a decision.

She replied the next day, “You have every right to butt in, but this is the school I want to go to. They have a department of criminal justice, which is very good and is what I plan to major in. Also, if you’re doing studies in the honors program, you get to work with teachers in tutorial relationships, which is something that I like because it’s not impersonal. I feel the school fits perfectly with my ambitions and I’ve been there and love everything about it.”

Good, I thought! She knows exactly what she wants. She told me that she wasn’t angry with me for intruding. “I know,” she said, “you only wanted what you thought was best for me.…”

Pineapple wrote to me at the start of April: “Heyyyy Jonathan!! I did not forget you. I’m a little stressed because I’m taking harder classes this semester. Sociology 208. Math 139. Allied Studies, which is s’posed to help me to stay organized. English 100. History of Greece and Rome and the rest of Europe up to something like the Middle Ages.… Doing well, but hoping to do better.”

She told me Lara’s graduation was coming up in May—“May 22,” she said.

A month later she reminded me again about the graduation. “We’re going to have a barbecue in the afternoon. Starts at two. I hope that you can come. XOXOXOX, Pineapple.”

I had to be in Boston the morning of the graduation, so I drove directly to their home and ended up arriving early for the party in the afternoon. There were only about a dozen people who’d arrived before me, relatives who’d driven up with Pineapple’s uncle from New York the night before, and a few of Lara’s closest friends who were in the kitchen with her mother.

The big surprise for me (Pineapple purposely had not told me to expect this) was that Virgilio was there. He was in the backyard setting up the barbecue when I came up
the driveway. He gave me a hug and a terrific smile, like someone who had just performed a magic trick, outwitting all the forces of the immigration service that had kept him from his children. He took off the long white apron he was wearing and we sat together at a table in a corner of the garden so he could explain to me how he had been able to get across the border, and across the country, without any papers.

He had come across the border from Mexico to Arizona, not far from Nogales—not at the legal crossing point but at another spot where people crossed at night illegally. From there, he took a bus to San Diego, where he used his U.S. driver’s license to get on a plane for New York City, and then drove here to Rhode Island in a rental car so that he’d arrive before his relatives. In spite of all the condemnation he’d incurred from his critics in Rhode Island who persisted in believing that he’d left his family of his own volition, with the implication that he was deficient in his love for his own children, he had been prepared to undergo arrest—or, given the vigilante atmosphere along the Arizona border, even greater dangers—in order to attend his daughter’s graduation.

He said that he intended to remain until he could learn more about the reasons for Isabella’s headaches and her worsening arthritis, and then figure out the implications for the children if Isabella did decide, which he said was still uncertain, to return with him to Guatemala. He was less concerned about the girls, who, he knew, were capable of handling themselves in their parents’ absence since they’d have each other to rely upon, than he was about their brother.

He didn’t want to interrupt the schooling Miguel was receiving but he also said that he did not believe a child who was only ten was old enough to live without his mother. In regard to Lara’s and Pineapple’s wish to keep him here
and function as his guardians, Virgilio, speaking in his measured English syllables, questioned whether they were truly able to assume so much responsibility. As mature as they appeared—and, in the case of Lara, as judicious in her thinking as he considered her to be—he said he wasn’t confident that they could fill a parent’s role or whether it was fair for him to let them even try to take on that position.

The more he spoke, the more I sensed how carefully and searchingly he’d been thinking through a set of questions he could not resolve but which saddened him tremendously. He reached out and put his hand around my arm and pressed it hard—his hand was strong—and when he spoke about Miguel, I could see his eyes were glistening slightly. It seemed as if he hoped I might have the right advice. But I did not, because I’d never faced a situation like this in the past. I was ashamed of the United States for placing any father in this situation and for the rigidity of policies that would penalize a child, only ten years old, born here in our nation and a citizen by right, by rendering his father an illegal.

Pineapple stepped out on the porch. Seeing that her father had begun to start the barbecue, she came across the yard and sat down at the table. I asked if she would like to stay outside and talk with me a while until the other guests, most of whom were Lara’s friends, had started to arrive.

“I’m in the mood to walk,” she said. “Would that be okay with you?”

I said that I’d enjoy that too.

There was, as I’ve said, a biking trail that started just beyond the garden. So we went off along the path and soon
came to the wooden bridge that crossed a broad expanse of water. Families were fishing from the bridge. Young people pedaled past. Older folks were strolling with their children or grandchildren.

“If we walk a little ways, there’s a place where we can get a lemonade, or lemon ices, if you want.”

“Would you like one?”

“Yes,” she said.

I asked if they were like the “icies” that we used to get when she came out of school in the South Bronx.

“Not exactly,” she replied. “More like frozen lemonade.”

“Can you get
real
icies anywhere in town?”

“Coconut icies?”

“Yes,” I said.

“They’re real hard to find. They do have them, but not in this part of town. They sell them in
some
neighborhoods.…”

The shop where they sold lemonade and lemon ices was, I soon discovered, a good distance from her home. I asked her if she minded if we stopped and rested on one of the benches by the path.