The Christmas Kid

The Boarder

MISS FLANAGAN WAS FORTY-ONE when Mr. Macias came knocking at her door. He had a newspaper under his arm and a tentative look in his eyes. Did she have a room to rent? The words stumbled, then broke; his English was not good. But she understood. Yes, she had a room to rent.

“Well,” he said. “I can see it, please?”

She looked down at him; he was a small man with a neat mustache, a cheap brown suit wrinkling at elbow and knee, black-and-white shoes. On the stoop beside him there was a battered suitcase. His eyes convinced her to let him into the hall; they were filled with rejection, and on that subject Miss Flanagan was an expert.

“Yes, of course.”

The room was at the back of the parlor floor, directly off the stoop. When her parents were alive, they’d used it for a bedroom; her mother liked the view of the garden, the fireplace in winter, the parquet floors, the elegant molding that was popular when the old craftsmen built the brownstones in this part of Brooklyn. But Miss Flanagan could never sleep there; she felt as if she were usurping part of her own past. It was all right for strangers; it simply wasn’t for her. When she opened the oak door, with its solid-brass fittings, and showed the room to Mr. Macias, he issued an involuntary little breath of surprise.

“Oh,” he said. “Is so beautiful.”

“Yes,” Miss Flanagan said. “It is beautiful.”

He ran a hand over the polished wood mantelpiece. He gazed through the windows at the garden, white with winter, the tree as precise as calligraphy. He turned to her, and his mouth trembled, and rejection washed through his eyes.

“How much it is?” he said.

She thought: a Hispanic man, the neighbors will be alarmed, I don’t know him, I don’t know where he came from, I don’t know what he might have done in his past. And then: to hell with it. He has sad eyes.

“Thirty dollars a week,” she said.

The sum must have been enormous to him. He inhaled, placed a hand in his pocket, took out some bills, and handed three tens to Miss Flanagan. He gazed again around the large, bright room and said: “I can move in now?”

And so it began. Every morning at nine, Mr. Macias left for work; every evening he arrived back at precisely seven; every Friday morning, the envelope with thirty dollars in cash was in her mailbox. Gradually, he bought himself new shoes, another suit, and a guitar. And the guitar changed everything. Miss Flanagan would lie alone at night in her bed on the third floor, trying to read or watch television, tired from the day’s work at the hospital, and she would hear Mr. Macias playing softly and singing in his own language.

She didn’t understand the words, but she knew their meaning. They were full of heartbreak, loss, exile; and she remembered her father when she was a little girl, when the uncles would come over for dinner, and the house would be loud with laughter and argument, and then, as night arrived, the mood would change, and her father would stand at the kitchen table and sing the old ballads of a lost home across a sea, of heartbreak, of exile.

She met him in the hall one Saturday morning and said: “Oh, Mr. Macias, you sing so beautifully.”

“Oh, sank you, sank you,” he said, and his eyes sparkled, and he smiled for the first time since coming to the room on the parlor floor. Miss Flanagan thought he had the most wonderful smile. “I’d love to hear you sing more,” she said. “And maybe you could teach me the words?”

“Oh, yes, okay. And maybe you teach me English better?”

Spring came and then the summer. She began to cook for Mr. Macias, to anticipate his arrivals, to sit with him at the kitchen table after dinner, and show him the meaning of the words in the newspapers, and give him books, and correct his pronunciation; and then he would sing the songs of Mexico. She loved a song called “La Cama de Piedra,” about a man who lies on a bed of stone, awaiting execution; she was moved by a song called “¿Dónde Estás?” and its line that said “Yo, sin tu amor, yo soy nada,” which meant “I, without your love, I am nothing.” He explained where Guadalajara was, Jalisco, and where the revolutionary heroes fought the battles mentioned in some of the songs, and he smiled his wonderful smile and she thought, Yo, sin tu amor, yo soy nada.

One night he took her to Roseland, and Miss Flanagan, who had considered herself too plain for most men, who was heavier than the fashion, whose clumsiness was a family joke when her parents were alive, Miss Flanagan began to dance. Mr. Macias showed her the simplest steps, in the shadows along the wall, and then led her into the crowd while a Latin band played a bolero. She was almost a foot taller than Mr. Macias, but he guided her firmly, and calmed her trembling, and held her closer than a man had held her in almost twenty years. That night, she moved to the room on the parlor floor.

There was no talk of marriage. That idea had died in her long ago; she would be what they used to call an old maid, she was certain of that. Certainly she could never propose such a thing to Mr. Macias. If she did, he might panic, flee; he might even have some buried secret, some wife in the old country, someone in his life whose existence Miss Flanagan didn’t want to know about. If Mr. Macias did not raise the question, then neither would Miss Flanagan. She would just enjoy this time for as long as it might last, this sudden, rich, and lovely interlude, this delayed portion of her youth, this gift.

Of course, it was technically a sin. She knew that. And yet Miss Flanagan believed in a merciful God: how could something so sweet, so tender, so human, be an offense against a just and merciful God? When her mother died, and her father lay sick and old for so many years, she had surrendered all hope of union with a man. She had sacrificed, denied herself, endured the long penance of loneliness. Did that mean she would go to her grave on the cama de piedra? Yes, she thought, I am a sinner, and I am now reduced to going to confession in different churches; but I am here, alive, on this earth, and I want Mr. Macias. Yo, sin tu amor, yo soy nada.

Then one morning, as she left for the hospital, she saw two men sitting in a blue Plymouth parked beside a fire hydrant. They seemed to be watching her, and Miss Flanagan was suddenly alarmed. She walked to the corner to take the bus, and looked back, and saw the blue Plymouth pull away. She stepped into a telephone booth and called her own number. Mr. Macias answered.

“There were two men in a car watching the house,” she said. “Do you think they were looking for you?”

He hesitated. “Why? Why would they look for me?”

“I–I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought—”

“Don’t worry. Please don’t worry.”

But all day at the hospital, she worried. And when she came home that night, and started to cook a meal, and realized swiftly that Mr. Macias was late, panic rushed through her. Suppose he never came back? Suppose he was afraid, scared of the police, an illegal alien who would be arrested and shipped home to Mexico? She tried to imagine the house with Mr. Macias gone, and she began to weep.

Then she heard the key turning in the gate beneath the stoop and the double doors opening, and when Mr. Macias entered, smiling, holding a large bunch of roses, she ran to him and wrapped her arms around him and held him to her generous breasts and thumping heart and wept some more.

A week later, at seven o’clock on a Friday morning, the doorbell rang. It was as she knew it would be. She pulled on a robe and walked along the parlor floor. Through the cut-glass inner doors, she could see the two men from the Plymouth. One was tall and blond, the other shorter, balding, smoking a cigarette. They each wore raincoats and bored expressions. She opened the door.

“Good morning,” the blond one said. He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet and showed her a plastic card that bore his picture.

“We’re here to pick up a man named Macias,” the shorter one said, flipping his cigarette into the street.

“Can I help you?” she said, and smiled. “I’m Mrs. Macias.”