What He's Poised to Do

Arriving in Miami, Tomas could not find a station in his given career, so he took work as a clerk in a shoe store, which was a bittersweet reminder of his youth. He continued to write to Rodriguez at a steady rate but did not mail his letters, as her location was still a mystery. The correspondence only occasionally reveals disappointment or frustration in Tomas’s tone. More typical is a February 1941 letter that reads, in part, “Today I spent some time by the water, walking along it, gazing across it, wondering which of these behaviors, each of which a mathematician would correctly call a ‘vector,’ most accurately reflects my position with regard to you. Am I walking alongside you, always, or looking across an expanse to find you?”

In the spring of that year, Tomas was badly injured in an automobile accident. For one month both of his arms were in a cast; this is one of only two sustained gaps in his ongoing correspondence with Rodriguez. When Tomas resumed his letter-writing, in mid-May, he once again did so with a regularity that did not ebb even when, in June, he struck up an intimate relationship with a daughter of the city of Miami named Eileen Ogham. The relationship had no discernible effect on the correspondence; in fact, Tomas even wrote freely to Rodriguez about Ogham. “Eileen and I are traveling up to Sarasota tomorrow, where she has an uncle. I think she expects me to romance her in the most obvious manner.” Tomas did so, evidently, because in July he wrote to Rodriguez that he and Ogham were to be wed. “I love her,” he wrote, “and I will tell you all about it when I see you, my dear Yamila. The two of us, entwined from the start of time and still in that most exalted of states, will sit at the shore and watch the waves recede like all that we have forgotten: I mean not that the waves will go away like the events that we have forgotten, but that they will go away like forgetting itself.”

At the shoe store, Tomas befriended several customers, including some soldiers. One of them had been a newspaper reporter before the war, and when he returned to his position after the war’s end, he recommended Tomas to a position as a typesetting foreman. He began his employ on the sixth of March of 1947. Three months later he and Eileen had their first child, a daughter named Julia. “She was a light to me from her first moments, just as you were,” he wrote in another unmailed letter to Rodriguez. “Do you remember how I felt when I first saw you on that Havana afternoon? Perhaps you cannot, and neither can my daughter. I held her in my arms and felt the rapid beat of my heart.” A second child, a boy, followed. “Thomas is his name,” he wrote to Rodriguez. “He is a scamp compared to Julia, who is something of an angel. I have spent some time imagining how they will look when they are older. Thomas, I think, has Eileen’s features. Julia has, I like to imagine, my sister’s. I imagine that you are curious to learn more about Sofia. In that, again, we are one. She has not written or called me since I left Cuba. I wonder if she is well.”

In 1949 Tomas lost his printing job and was forced to return to the shoe store, and the amount he was able to earn there was not enough to keep food on the table. Then the store suffered a small fire and Tomas was forced to take work as a busboy in a café, where the pay was worse still. “At least I can bring home food at the end of the day for my wife and children,” he wrote to Rodriguez. “Yesterday I was packing up the food, which consisted primarily of burned meatloaf that could not be served, and I found myself thinking of you. Inexplicable, perhaps, but the thought was strong and sudden and brought a blush to my face. I will tell you about it soon. Now, I have limited time. I am going to meet with Eileen’s father. In my time of trouble, her parents have not offered any help and in fact they have turned against us in a surprising way.” The meeting seemed successful. But this was an illusory success; before the end of the year, Eileen had left Tomas to take up with another man. “It is painful,” Tomas wrote to Rodriguez, “to imagine him raising my children as his own.”

Tomas passed through a period of extreme exhaustion, though he was still a young man. “I am passing through a period of extreme exhaustion, though I am still a young man,” he wrote to Rodriguez. He took as a girlfriend the daughter of a man who owned a diner. For a year, insensible to all but the most basic needs, he lived with this new woman, Anna, as man and wife. “Even though she is only nineteen,” he wrote to Rodriguez, “she is wise, and she has recently been telling me that I need to try to have my family again. I think she has no other reason to say so except her goodness, which was an idea I had stopped believing in, and was on the verge of killing in myself. I have even been thinking of stronger evils like robbery.”