Tidewater Review - May 2011

 

When Tito Loved Clara
by
Anne Stinson

 

When Tito Loved Clara by Jon Michaud. Algonquin Books at Chapel Hill. 352 pages. $23.95.
When Tito Loved Clara? When did Tito NOT love Clara? This novel, written by the head librarian at The New Yorker magazine, has all the earmarks of that prestigious publication: wit, clarity, perspicacity and graceful prose. It belongs in that rare category, “can’t put it down.”
Both of the main characters have known each other since they were children in the Dominican Republic, and now both live in the United States. Both are bright, relatively ambitious naturalized citizens whose paths accidentally cross in New York. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since they graduated from high school in upper Manhattan.
Clara’s diploma came with a generous college scholarship. Tito stayed on with his first employer, the owner of a fleet of moving vans. Tito spent his high school years lifting furniture into and out of trucks on weekends and school nights. He’s moved up the in company and now has added responsibility – he canvasses the city and suburbs to sell the services to clients who are moving from one apartment to another. He also ventures into New Jersey to sign up former city dwellers who have left the crowded boroughs for the dream of clean streets, real backyards and fewer crowds, only to find they are homesick for the clamor and dirt of the city. They want to return, and Tito has the solution.
Clara’s life followed a different journey. She won a scholarship to Cornell University. She kept it secret from her father and stepmother, fearing that father would refuse to let her leave home until she was married. She planned to work during the summer after graduation and simply take a bus to Ithaca at the last moment before her freshman year. Once gone, he would rage, but he’d never follow her. The plan was aborted when she received notice that the school had a financial crisis and all scholarships had to be canceled.
It’s a bitter blow. Clara is desperate to leave the crowded apartment with the stepmother she loathes, a harridan who beat her with a stick from the time she was a child of five. At that age she was living an idyllic life with her loving grandparents on their farm in the Dominican Republic after her parents emigrated to New York when she was a baby.
When her father abducts her without even telling the old couple he was back on the island, he spirits her onto a plane for New York, promising her they will reunite with her mother.
On arrival, Clara finds that her mother has left and her father has remarried. He insists that the little girl kiss her new mother. Clara, kicking and screaming, refuses. When she is lifted up and pressed against the interloper’s cheek, Clara bites the woman. The insult is never forgiven. Clara becomes the family drudge with daily beatings from that day forward. She is never allowed to leave the apartment except for school and Saturdays clerking in her father’s hardware store.
College was to be her dreamed-of escape. Now that is gone.
After high school she works full time at the store, returning to the family’s apartment at closing time to an unending list of chores and cruelty.
She saves enough money to enroll in a school for librarians, finds a job as a reference clerk with a law firm and still lives at home. Eventually she meets a fellow librarian, a quiet, shy young man, and they marry. It’s not a union of love, but an escape from her stepmother’s hatred.
Clara’s first pregnancy ends in a miscarriage, and further attempts to have a child are fruitless. It is a calm, companionable existence that deteriorates when her husband is laid off from his job.
That’s when Tito and Clara bump into each other again. Complications follow, as they do in real life as well as in fiction. Long-hidden secrets begin to unravel, and with them, so do the characters’ lives.
Clara’s missing mother turns up with an irresponsible daughter and teenaged granddaughter. Clara’s half-sister Yunis is separating from her live-in boyfriend, Raul, an ex-con drug addict and thief. Fed up with his behavior, Yunis tosses Raul out, sub-lets her apartment and, with her teenaged daughter, moves into Clara’s and her husband’s apartment.
The family drama compounds when it is revealed that the teen is pregnant. Clara’s husband finds a part-time job with a bonus: his new temporary assignment comes with sexual temptations.
That’s the inopportune time that Tito and Clara meet again. Fifteen years have passed and Tito, still carrying a torch for Clara, still a bachelor living with his aging parents, sells a moving job to an old teacher of Clara’s. In the process of packing the old lady’s belongings, he sees a photo of the girls in the “book club” at high school. One of them is Clara, just as he remembers her. He’s ignited with the old passion.
He is obsessed with the need to find her again, and the coincidences that bring them together are wildly unlikely – but totally believable, thanks to author Michaud’s skill and imagination, as breathtaking as the Dominican Republic island on which part of the story revisits.
Michaud’s understanding of the islanders’ reaction to the “gringa’s” return to her ancestral home resonates with the attitude of the left-behinds, all who expect gifts and money from their rich relatives (no matter how poor they still may be), rings with authenticity.
There’s a spicy serving of irony when the handsome, worthless Raul is the deus machina that connects the two former lovers.
Above all, the contrast is bright as a neon sign in the fates of one immigrant who has assimilated to urban life in cold Manhattan and the lover who remains unchanged from the old ways.
The book has everything to keep the reader glued to the story – courage, cruelty, immorality, dogged persistence and the power of love to prevail. The book’s publishing date was March 8, and it will undoubtedly be on the best seller lists soon. Don’t miss this one.

Anne Stinson began her career in the 1950s as a free lance for the now defunct Baltimore News-American, then later for Chesapeake Publishing, the Baltimore Sun and Maryland Public Television’s panel show, Maryland Newsrap. Now in her ninth decade, she still writes a monthly book review for Tidewater Times.