An American Son: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

coffee and cookies on the street corners of Havana and any other jobs he could find. My father was only eight years old when he had to quit school to work. Though his formal education had ended, he would teach himself to read and write, a testament to his natural intelligence, discipline and work ethic.
    My grandmother’s health began to deteriorate rapidly from the physical strain of giving birth to eight children and the emotional strain caused by their poverty. In 1935, on her forty-second birthday, she passed away from pneumonia. My father was four days shy of his ninth birthday. They held her wake in the common living room of the boardinghouse, and buried her in a small ossuary my grandfather had purchased in Havana’s Colón Cemetery.
    My grandfather was left to care for seven devastated children, the oldest just sixteen and the youngest four. He became deeply depressed after hiswife’s death, and was never the same man again. He worked the streets all day, leaving the kids to fend for themselves. Nena moved in with her aunt permanently, and the rest of the children remained with their father in a single bedroom at the boardinghouse.
    They were hard times, and food was scarce. When she was nine, my aunt Georgina went to work as a maid for a Spanish family, who let her bring their leftovers home. But many nights, my father and his siblings went to bed hungry. None of the kids ever complained. “When you grow up hungry,” Georgina recalled, “you learn not to ask.” My father’s memory of not having enough to eat might explain why, rather than chastise us, he would always get up from the table and bring us something else to eat when we refused to eat the meal my mother had prepared. He never wanted us to go to bed hungry, even if it meant spoiling us.
    My father found his first steady employment at a bodega near the boardinghouse, where he had often watched the shop’s Spanish owner and his customers play dominoes. One day he found a wallet on the ground and asked the men if any of them had lost it. One of the customers accused my father of stealing it. The owner came to his defense, and scolded his accuser. Rather than scream at him, he told his customer, you should give him a reward. Chastened, the other man offered him a small reward, but my father refused it. Impressed by his character, the shop owner offered him a job on the spot, busing tables in the bodega’s small cafeteria. My father was only nine years old, and would earn his own living for the next seventy years. The job didn’t last long; the owner fired him when he caught him eating a chocolate bar without asking permission.
    A few years after his wife died, my grandfather began a relationship with a woman named Dolores Cardín. She lived with her children in her own home, and my grandfather moved in with them. My father and his brothers, Papo and Emilio, remained at the boardinghouse. My grandfather and Dolores never married, but they had a son, and remained together for the rest of my grandfather’s life.
    My father rarely discussed Dolores with us. On the few occasions he mentioned her, he did so very matter of factly, without giving much weight to her role in his life. We know from my mother and aunt that she was very unkind to him and his siblings. Her own children took precedence over the motherless Rubios. She made them feel like outcasts in their father’shome. Five years after my grandmother died, my father was living on his own. He was just fourteen years old.
    My father never resented his father for bringing Dolores into their lives and, according to my aunt, he never criticized her. He visited his father, and occasionally spent the night. Naturally, he must have wondered why his father hadn’t insisted on keeping his children with him. What else could a fourteen-year-old boy abandoned by his father have felt but that he was unloved and unwanted?
    My father was a humble man, and a cheerful one. I never saw him betray bitterness or