After the Hurricane(62)

Yes, it was hard. But he was not alone, not as he had been. He had Rosalind, who called him every week on Sunday evenings and listened to him talk and talk and talk about laws and precedents and things she didn’t care at all about, dizzy from the sound of his voice. He had his professors, who liked him, enjoyed his liberal dissent, enjoyed his defenses of socialism, enjoyed his determination. He also had a new energy that coursed through his veins, bright and electric. He could stay up for hours reading, studying, thinking, without food. He had had moments like this in college, but in his first year of law school he was shot through with a vivid bright energy that made him feel powerful, limitless. It was like a superpower, like the comic books he had loved as a child. He wondered if he had been bit by a radioactive spider, or something, but without the downside. He could not imagine living without this energy now, this wild never-ending jolt. He thought it would never go away, that this was who he was now. But all superheroes forget that power asks a price, and Santiago was no different. He had a new power and that was all he knew.

And he had Diego, who he met in his first-year constitutional law class.

“You must be the other wetback,” he heard a cultured voice say, snidely, as he took out his notebook. He was early, he usually was, he liked to be early for class, get settled in. He turned, his lip curling in disgust, and saw a pale-skinned man with the features of a Spanish aristocrat beaming at him, broadly.

“My family took a flight here. Like most Puerto Ricans,” he said.

“Doesn’t it ever make you mad we don’t have a good sob story? People eat that up, talking about how you clung to the side of a boat from Cuba, or swam the Rio Grande.” The man had no accent, but he said Rio Grande perfectly.

“Maybe you don’t have a sob story. I’m poor.” Santiago wasn’t sure how to take this man, who had moved to sit next to him.

“That’s good. I bet that does well with this crowd. Gets you all kinds of ass.”

“I have a girlfriend.”

“Then it clearly did very well. Me, I’ve got nothing. And I like men. You can imagine how that plays out with the WASP setup here in Connecticut.” Santiago drew back. He had gay friends in San Francisco but none of them had declared it as quickly as this man.

“What’s the matter? You worried I’m gonna jump you?” the man said, with an exaggerated leer.

“Of course not. If you wanted that you would have stayed in Puerto Rico. I’m sure you came here for some variety,” Santiago said, grinning. He could fight back. Neil had taught him how. The man smiled at him, a genuine smile.

“Absolutely. You’re safe from me. Diego Perez Acevedo.”

“Santiago Vega Junior.” The Junior had been automatic, and he regretted it.

Diego winced.

“I bet everyone calls you Junior, don’t they? Fucking Puerto Ricans.”

“I hate it,” Santiago said. Diego was the first person he had ever told that.

“I promise, on my honor as a gentleman and a scholar, to never fucking call you Junior.” They shook on it, and the class began.

Diego was the first Puerto Rican he had ever met who was truly proud of being so. He knew more about the island than Junior, he knew about the crimes the American government had perpetuated against the Puerto Rican people and he was vocal in his criticism, especially of the military.

Santiago couldn’t wait to introduce him to Neil, who had begrudgingly forgiven him for his defection to the East Coast, and sent him long letters detailing his classes at Berkeley, and the work he was doing as a volunteer for a young politician, Harvey Milk, an openly gay man who he was starting to believe was going to change everything. For all of Neil’s social liberalism, his one sticking point in any argument was the army, an institution he stayed staunchly loyal to no matter the numbers pouring in from Vietnam, no matter the protests. Santiago was sure that they were going to hate each other.

He couldn’t wait.

New Haven might be terrible, the proximity to New York might be hellish, but his life had never felt more complete than at this moment. He had someone who loved him, someone he loved. He had friends, and a direction in life. He was as free from his past as he had ever been. Nothing could touch him, now, not when everything was so settled, so clear.

Later, when he got the call from the hospital that his grandmother had died suddenly, and that he was now completely responsible for his mother, for her care, for her life, he would realize that moment alone in the night was the happiest, calmest moment of his life. He knew that when he compared it to the sheer blinding terror he suddenly felt, the recognition that now everything would slip back into the filth from which he had come, and there was nothing, nothing at all that he could do about it.

He knew, as he began to make the arrangements, to funnel money into her care, to make his mother, once again, the center of his life, that he had been right to fear coming east. His past was always waiting here, to burden him. He should have stayed in California.



Santiago went to visit his father for the first time in years in the summer between his senior year of college and his first year of law school. He could no longer claim he was too far away to make the trip, as he was spending the summer in Philadelphia with Rosalind, working in the accounting department of her family department store while she took classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. On the weekends they borrowed one of her parents’ cars and drove out to Valley Forge. She took him to the Brandywine River Museum of Art, which had opened just the year before. They went out to Amish country, where she taught him about the Pennsylvania Dutch, and he tried fresh cider and the best cinnamon buns he had ever had. They bought cucumbers and eggplants as big as his calf and Rosalind’s mother made a salad with dill and vinegar and onions, and charred the eggplant, preparing a recipe she had learned from a Turkish employee at the store.