Dermie & Me

It was at a wedding that I first became aware of Dermie. And a wedding would be the last place we would ever see each other.

The first nuptials were a quiet affair in 1960, with only six people present – the bride and groom; the matron of honor and best man; Dermie; and me, the almost six-year old child of the couple stating vows before God and all present.

My parents’ wedding day nine years earlier in Cuba was captured in a sepia-toned portrait taken in one of La Habana’s most popular portrait studios, Foto Yo. My mother – a dark-haired beauty in a white satin gown that she had sown herself and that would later be worn by three of her five sisters – and my father – distinguished-looking in a dark suit, his hair combed back, his moustache neatly trimmed – stand side by side, gazing into their future.

The future they could never gaze far enough into caused them to leave Cuba only a few years later. By the time I was old enough to begin school in the fall of 1960, they had lived in los Estados Unidos long enough to have concluded that there was no greater horror than the public schools of New York City and went to enroll me in the local parish school instead. There, they were confronted with the mother of all horrors – the news that the Almighty not only frowned upon their civil marriage but dismissed its validity altogether. Consequently, their illegitimate-in-the-eyes-of-God child wouldn’t be able attend school as long as they remained in their unmarried-in-the-eyes-of-God state.

Enter Dermie.

No one would have thought of calling him that then. He was Father McDermott – ordained to the priesthood just a year earlier, tall, young, good-looking, able to carry off a cassock as few men can, with Clark Kent-like horn-rimmed glasses and the ability to speak just enough laughable broken high school Spanish to be considered an asset to a parish with changing demographics. He married my parents – again – in the process making me legitimate enough to attend parochial school for the next 12 years.

 And that’s all that was really wanted.

Although a plaster statue of La Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of the island, and a brass crucifijo that my mother had taken to the hospital with her when she gave birth – both brought over from Cuba – occupied a makeshift altar on which candles were occasionally lit in our apartment, my family was culturally Catholic at best, not practicing adherents of the faith.

El padrecito saw a field ripe unto harvest.

He began making pastoral visits, trekking up five flights of stairs to our top-floor walk-up on Ninth Avenue and 35th Street. “¡Benigno!” he would call up to my father as he started his ascent, “¿hay cristianos allí arriba?” and continue the climb as my father called down, “No, padre, sólo judíos.” He would lead us in the rosary – just him and the three of us at first, but later on, he started bringing a few other parishioners. Sometimes, he would bring a statue of Mary – encased in dark wood and glass and with a little slot at the base for offerings – turning our living room into a shrine for the Latino faithful of Hell’s Kitchen.

Over the years, he heard my confessions and gave me penance (not yet the post-Vatican II Sacrament of Reconciliation), placed the host on my tongue at my First Communion and was present at my Confirmation. He blessed my throat on the feast of Saint Blaise and imposed ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday, and acquiesced to my requests to bless countless items both sacred and profane.

And as I watched him consecrate the Eucharist on Sundays and First Fridays and Holy Days of Obligation, I knew that where he was at that kairos moment was where the Holy One wanted me to be, too.

Father McDermott was transferred to a parish on the Lower East Side the same summer we moved uptown to Washington Heights but we remained in touch. He and my father spoke regularly over the phone. When one of my Cuban tías died, he was the one who said the memorial Mass. One day, as we sat in front of the TV watching the six o’clock news, a report came on about a priest who had created a scandal in his parish with the announcement that he had fallen in love. On the screen was Father McDermott.

We heard that he left the priesthood not long after that. My father became disillusioned and from time to time would talk about el ex-Padre McDermott. I saw him once, in a bookstore in Greenwich Village, during my undergraduate days at NYU.

The second nuptials were a big affair.

In the mid-1990s, I was serving in my third pastorate when a church member asked me to co-officiate at her wedding, which would take place in a Catholic church. Her husband-to-be was a former priest and a colleague of his was to be the other officiant. On the day of the wedding, as we waited for the bride and her party to arrive, groom and priest spoke about all their seminary friends who had come to celebrate the occasion. Feeling left out of their male-dominated ecclesiastical shoptalk, I interrupted to ask the groom where they all had been in seminary together.

“St. Joseph’s. Dunwoodie.”

“When were you ordained?”

“In 1959.”

“Our parish priest when I was a kid went to Dunwoodie and was ordained in 1959.”

“Really? What was his name?”

“Dermot McDermott.”

“DERMIE? You’re kidding me. DERMIE! He’s sitting right out there.”

With that, he pointed out a big, bespectacled gray-haired man, sitting in the pews with his petite wife – decades older, but unambiguously my priest. During the ceremony, I thought I saw the same spark of recognition in him.

We spent time talking at the reception. He remembered climbing up the five flights of stairs. He inquired after my parents, especially my father. He spoke of the work he had done as a community organizer since leaving the priesthood and about a trip he had made to Cuba in the 1970s. He now spoke español effortlessly. I talked about family – my young kids, my aging parents, my new husband – and my work and the long circuitous path that had led there.

It had all started with a wedding.

Mustard seeds were sown on those childhood Sunday mornings when I would follow along in my missal and Father Dermie, facing the altar with his back to the worshipers, would speak the Latin words of consecration over the bread and the wine, holding the elements aloft then genuflecting reverently as the altar boys rang the bells in perfect tempo to his every move. When we stood on the holy ground within the stone walls of the 19th century inner city church – kingdom of heaven in the midst of Hell's Kitchen, smells and bells, ritual and symbol stirring the senses of the congregation – I could almost hear the Spirit whisper my name as She tugged gently on my soul.

Dermie died of cancer the following year. With weddings as bookends to the ordinary time in between, the story had come full circle.

Next Year...

Just about now, my cousin Nelson is probably looking out the window at a lush landscape as his plane begins the descent into José Martí International Airport in the elegant Rancho Boyeros section of La Habana, once home to nightclubs with names like Bambú and Mulgoba and Topeka recommended in 1950s travel guides for their “typical Cuban nightclub” atmosphere and “good music and shows.”

The flight from Miami to La Habana takes less than an hour – about the same duration as shuttle service between New York and Boston or D.C. – and spans the same distance, some 200+ miles (the oft-referenced 90-mile distance across the Florida Straits being the distance between the northernmost point of the island and the Florida Keys). After a two-month visit with relatives in norteamérica, Nelson will be welcomed home by Lucía, his wife and soul mate of 25 years, and as many other relatives as can be rounded up – daughters and sons-in-law and their children and grandchildren; primos hermanos (literally “sibling cousins,” the term reserved for first cousins); primos (those second, third and fourth cousins, once, twice, thrice removed – the generations before us were a fertile bunch); in-laws – all of whom have waited at the airport for hours in anticipation of his return.

Our family didn’t live in Rancho Boyeros or El Vedado or the other upscale, fashionable residential areas of the city (except for one tía who married well in the early 1950s and moved to Miramár). They had migrated in the mid-1930s to La Habana from Pinar del Río, the westernmost province, where our grandparents and their 13 children lived and worked in the Centrál Azucarero Mercedita, a sugar cane plantation and mill owned by the American Sugar Company. When they arrived in the city, they settled in the Lawton district (once described by Ernest Hemingway as a place so depressing it was best experienced while inebriated), in a tiny three-room house on Calle Fonts, where subsequently four generations of the family would live over a period spanning 70 years. There, our grandmother Mamita, who had no formal education and never learned to read or write, reigned supreme over an ever-expanding brood until her death shortly before what would have been her 98th birthday.

Nelson’s father Desiderio, the firstborn child of Mamita and our Asturian grandfather Papito, was born in 1905, six years after the United States and Spain (but not Cuba, which was not represented at the bargaining table) ratified the Treaty of Paris formally ending the Spanish-American-Cuban War, and only three years after cubanos elected their first president, Dr. Tomás Estrada Palma and witnessed the Cuban flag flying over La Habana for the first time – replacing the American flag, which had flown over Cuba because the treaty had ceded the island to the U.S.

Desiderio's sister, my mother Julia, was born a generation later in 1927, the second youngest of the Mamita-Papito offspring. She was 17 when Nelson was born and 19 when he was brought to live in the house on Calle Fonts, where five unmarried aunts doted upon him. A gifted child, he excelled academically and would have entered La Universidad de La Habana at the age of 14 had it not been for the school’s three-year closure in the last years of the Batista dictatorship. By the time the university reopened, his life had taken a different path.

Nelson was almost 11 when I came into la familia as the second oldest of a group of nine primos hermanos born in rapid succession between 1953 and 1963. During the last seven months of my life in Cuba, after my father Benigno had come to the United States and until my mother and I joined him in New York, Nelson and I lived under Mamita's roof along with my mother, two aunts, three uncles and a sprinkling of primos.

And then, in August 1957, our lives parted.


My parents and I returned to Cuba for brief visits in 1959 and 1960, but I confess that my only memories of Nelson come from a picture taken during one of those trips, when the station wagon that nine of us were piled into got a flat, and someone (my father, I believe) took out a camera and had everyone pose by the sidelined vehicle while Nelson – also pictured, but clearly not posing – changed the tire.

For the next 39 years, our paths never intersected. He married, had four daughters, married again – making his living as a bus driver and using his keen intellect and skills to keep his used, well-loved 1954 Plymouth Savoy running to this day. I grew up in New York City, went to college, graduate school, seminary, gave birth to three children – a son and two daughters – and was blessed with more children when I married a man with three daughters. I've been a writer, editor, pastor, preacher. Nelson never strayed far from Lawton, living in the surrounding towns all his life and not once traveling outside the country until now. I've lived in New York City; in three different cities in Massachusetts; and for the last 24 years home has been Westchester County, 25 miles northeast of New York City (or what we used to call “upstate” when I was a child growing up in the city because even though Westchester bordered on the Bronx, it had a different area code). I’ve had opportunities to see many other parts of the world.

By the time we reconnected on a two-week trip that my parents, spouse, kids and I took to Cuba in 1999, Nelson and I were middle-aged adults in our 40s and 50s who hadn't seen each other since childhood. Three years later, when we returned to Cuba, he and I were creeping up on 60 and 50, respectively. After that trip, the last presidential administration made it impossible for most of us Cuban nationals to return to the island by redefining who and what constituted familia in a way that was incomprehensible to those of us being defined. So for the next six and a half years, contact with Nelson was by way of the occasional phone call, or a letter or picture sent via a third-party intermediary. It was Nelson who managed to send me a copy of my birth certificate, finally putting to rest my decades-long insistence that there existed no proof that I had ever been born.

Then, this summer, Nelson arrived on a two-month tourist visa that had taken years to obtain. After a few days with the Dade County branch of the family, he was escorted north by another prima hermana and spent the next six weeks among the northeast relatives, using my mother’s apartment and my home as his bases of operations.

With little more in common than an eccentric gene pool, we began to get to know one another, making our way from the primos part of our relationship to the hermanos part, learning more about who we were, and who our people were and are, filling in the missing information gaps along the way.

And so we, the primos hermanos who had left as children – by 1968, there were seven of us numbered among the Cuban diaspora – were able to confirm that the memory of a birthday cake out of which una lagartija (a small tropical lizard) had crawled was not a figment of the imagination. Nelson had been there, and it was true. Or that vicious, toe-biting ducks that inspired in me a lifetime fear of fowl had indeed wandered through the three little rooms in the house on Calle Fonts. Nelson remembered not only ducks, but also the chickens, pigs, goat and cow that our grandmother, who never really left the country behind, kept in back of the house at one time or another. (The cow was actually kept in a friend’s yard a couple of blocks away; Mamita's was a small yard.) Or that a certain transplanted primo hermano always had to be the one who blew out the candles, no matter whose birthday it was – there, and here. Nelson had witnessed it many times over. We learned stories kept partially hidden by an earlier generation; perhaps to protect us as children from what we couldn't understand, perhaps later to put the best possible face on la familia. We revealed partially hidden stories of our own.

And I concluded that Amy Tan didn't go far enough – it’s not just our mothers who inhabit our bones, but the entire tribe, the clan that birthed us, that helped mold our thoughts, that still gathers together as in generations past around holiday tables, resembling our parents more with each passing season, even when we no longer live in the same house, or in the same apartment building, or on the same city block. They are in our bones, and in our souls. And it is they who make us complete.

I spoke with Nelson last night, his last day in los Estados Unidos before returning to the woman he loves and the home he loves, where he is surrounded by an ever greater circle of lives – a cloud of witnesses past, present and future – who form the connective tissue of our people. And we ended our conversation with the promise: 

El año que viene, en La Habana. 

Next year, in La Habana.