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“This is your father.” When José tried to kiss him, Ray yelled, “I don’t have a father!” kicked him in the shins, and ran out of the apartment. José never came by again.
    Nor did he ever send child support. Viejita (an affectionate term for “Old Lady”) had to bring them up on her own. Born in Venezuela, she had raised her own daughter alone in New York—her Mexican husband having deserted her when she got pregnant. Now in her mid-forties and employed as a pieceworker at the Pickwick Mills factory, Viejita was lucky if she could bring home fifty dollars a week. Yet she did her determined best to keep the refrigerator full and clotheson the children’s backs—that is, until Sonia’s father reappeared one day and took her off to live with a couple he knew who, like himself, were Puerto Rican.
    Viejita was never the same. Sonia had reminded her of her own daughter, and that made the loss doubly devastating. After years of trying, she finally tracked down Sonia and her adopted family in Brooklyn. But when Viejita and Ray went there for dinner, the evening proved a disaster; annoyed that Sonia kept calling her adopted mother Mommy, Ray finally blurted out, “That’s not your mother! You’re my sister and you don’t even know that! Your moms is dead!” Sonia’s “mommy” politely ushered Viejita and Ray out the door. It was years before they were invited back again, and Viejita threatened Ray with death if he so much as mentioned the past. Ray managed to hold his tongue, and the day went off well. Thereafter, Viejita was occasionally allowed to visit, and she periodically sent Sonia gifts and money; but Ray never saw his sister again.
    Viejita seemed to blame him for the separation. She told him he was a “troublemaker,” that she had only wanted Sonia, not him. When he left a spot of dirt after cleaning the apartment, or when he failed to iron her blouse just so, she would beat him. Ray didn’t doubt that Viejita loved him in her own way, but he turned increasingly to Sarah, an upstairs neighbor who had known his mother and was herself childless. Sarah would buy him little things that his grandmother couldn’t afford, and she would listen to him talk about his unhappiness.
    In 1958, when Ray was seven, Viejita fell ill and sent him off to St. Agnes, a Catholic home for boys. She felt well again within six months, but delayed bringing Ray back home until the nuns strongly recommended that she do so. But she didn’t seem to want him around anymore and started to board him out on weekdays. She at first sent him to people she knew in the neighborhood and then, for a long stretch when he was nine, to Elisa, a Colombian friend whom Viejita had sponsored as an immigrant. Elisa and her husband lived in a nice house in Sea Cliff, Long Island—they were the only Hispanic family in the town—and they sent him to the local Catholic school. Elisa was good to Ray most of the time—as long as he meticulously completed the many chores she gave him—but when she got in “one of her moods,” she would beat him for the slightest infraction, or for no reason at all, and not just with a belt but with a two-by-four plank. She also beat him on the day she invited him, aged ten, into her bed and he refused to go.
    On weekends, holidays and during the summers, Ray would return to Viejita, who had moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was never too happy about his return. The neighbors had begun to tease her about Ray’s effeminacy, predicting he would soon be a full-fledged maricón . What they didn’t know was that he had already, at age seven, had sex with his fourteen-year-old cousin—and by age ten was having sex regularly with a married man down the block.
    Returning from the man’s apartment one evening with hickeys on his neck, Ray couldn’t understand why Viejita was staring at him so