Through the crack by the light of the street lamp she could see a man, no, a boy. A very large boy with long blond hair that looked in the dimness to be almost the color of Janet’s.

“What do you want?”

“She sent something.” He held out a shapeless bundle.

“Can you leave it? I’m not dressed.”

“All right,” he said cheerfully. He set it down and his bearlike shadow bounded away. She put on her robe and turned on all the lights and waited a long time until her courage gathered, then she flung off the chain and snatched the bundle and slammed the door and locked it and sat on the bed with her heart pounding. Wrapped in a loose chrysalis of old newspaper was a large bouquet of colored paper flowers. Big blossoms in shades of black, yellow and orange. Just the right colors.

She went back to bed with the lights on and lay there admiring the room, less frightened. Eventually she stopped imagining she heard tappings on her door and soon after that she fell asleep, sensing for the first time that she was in her own home.

13: Rafael Meomartino

13

Rafael Meomartino

When Meomartino was a small boy he had regularly accompanied Leo, the family factotum, to Saint Raphael’s, a small whitewashed church surrounded on all sides by his father’s cane fields, there to receive the cool wafer on the tongue from Father Ignacio, a guajiro worker-priest with bad breath, to whom he regularly confessed the sins of his early adolescence and received the gentle respectful penalties of privilege.

I have had evil thoughts, Father.

Five Hail Mary’s and five Acts of Contrition, my son.

I have abused my body, Father.

Five Hail Mary’s and five Acts of Contrition. Struggle against the weakness of the flesh, my son.

For weddings and funerals the family was accustomed to the pomp of the Cathedral in Havana, but on ordinary occasions Rafe felt at home in the small church, which had been built by his father’s labor gangs the day he was born. Kneeling in the dark, damp interior before the plaster statue of his patron saint, he would make his penance and then ask the archangel to intercede for him against a tyrannical teacher, to help him to learn Latin, to protect him from Guillermo.

Now, lying haunch to haunch with the sleeping wife to whom he had given cold and despairing love an hour before, he thought of Saint Raphael and wished fervently that he were twelve years old again.

He had stopped believing at Harvard. It had been a long time since he had confessed, years since he had really talked to a priest.

Saint Raphael, he said silently into the dark room.

Show me how I can help her.

Help me to see where I have failed her, why I do not quench her, why she goes to other men.

Silverstone, he thought.