A woman in full
Oscar Hijuelos gives his heroine on the `upper lower class' all the dignity of an empress

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 7, 1999

Page: H1

Section: Books

Empress of the Splendid Season
By Oscar Hijuelos. HarperFlamingo. 342 pp. $25.

Oscar Hijuelos's voice is so distinctive you might recognize it from a grocery list. Tucked among the oranges and chicken and milk would come the telling Hijuelos instruction: ``And don't forget the mangoes for Mrs. Diaz's birthday party.'' Formal and intimate at once, his tone evokes emotional revelations simply by the respect he shows his subjects. In capturing a life -- one woman's weary afternoon, say, or a young man's memory of a first love -- Hijuelos manages to convey the ultimate kindness by cloaking everything he writes in dignity.

This quiet precision in Hijuelos's work is often camouflaged by the flashier aspects of his novels: the gorgeous realism of ``The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,'' the flood of sensuality in ``The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien,'' the somber force of ``Mr. Ives' Christmas.'' In ``Empress of the Splendid Season,'' the empress herself -- one carefully realized Lydia Espana, a Cuban-American housekeeper in New York -- sometimes overshadows the hand who has drawn her. This is a novel about class: about the cruel absurdities of the American dream and the grim realities that belong to the hostages it takes. But this larger theme appears only through the bittersweet accumulation of Lydia's life, lived inch by inch, day by day, with a splendor that owes far more to endurance than to victory.

One of the virtues of Lydia as a character is that she is never romanticized, or made to seem noble merely by the fact of her poverty. Preferring to think of herself as ``upper lower class,'' she's considered a snob by some of her peers and a mystery by her children. But Lydia partly survives her quotidian life by escaping it, and this often means the fanciful notions and wistful superiority offered by pop culture as a way out. If, while she dusts, Lydia daydreams about her privileged life as a wealthy young girl in Cuba, or believes that a Hollywood star has smiled at her on a Manhattan streetcorner, such pretensions are simply part of her fight-back fantasy. Stripped of illusion, no life is bearable all the time.

The beautiful, self-centered daughter of a small-town mayor in pre-Castro Cuba, Lydia was banished from the family by her father when she spent the night with a near-stranger. It was 1947, she was 22 and disgraced, and she emigrated to New York -- the starting-over point for millions of Americans. Two years later, at a dance in the Bronx, she met the reserved and decent man she would marry. A waiter who was 10 years older than Lydia, Raul adored her -- and wrote her a poem describing his feelings, ``like the morning sun on the most glorious day / of the most beautiful and splendid season.'' To Raul, she was an empress whose title could never be taken away.

This man with a strong work ethic and a weak heart, as Lydia comes to think of him, drops his laden tray one night at work a few years later, suffering the first of several heart attacks that will dictate the rest of his life. By now the mother of two young children, Rico and Alicia, Lydia begins cleaning houses to support the family -- an occupation that promises exhausting work as well as solitude, a modicum of independence, and occasionally a day's worth of voyeuristic distraction. Carrying her gentility with her like a sword into her job interviews, Lydia gains servant's entrance into some of the finest apartments in Manhattan. What she glimpses there over the years, of course, has everything to do with material splendor and entitlement -- the silent whoosh of doors opening everywhere -- but little to do with that most elusive of qualities, happiness.

``Empress of the Splendid Season'' unfolds with straightforward chronology, following Lydia through some three decades of servitude, suggesting the bitter disaffection she's prone to as well as the deep sustenance of her friends and family. This and-then-and-then approach can be off-putting: Hijuelos has a tendency toward the warm-for-its-own-sake vignette, and then the course of the novel can seem more anecdotal than deliberate. But the failing is transient. By the end of Lydia's fictional arc, her years of work and children -- of joys merged with disappointments -- comes to feel like the hard-earned life it is: a testament to getting through.

The strength of this novel, though, owes less to plot than to the humanity of its narrator. Bestowing his Lydia with a detachment, even numbness, that will plague her relations with her children (and also infect them), Hijuelos underscores the emotional burdens of poverty without ever having to name them. Hints of this discord appear from the outset, particularly with Rico, and it is his chance at a ``better'' life that the reader begins to cling to -- unconsciously, we are made to understand the ultimate immigrant experience. Other people come and go through Lydia's working life -- the wealthy, kind-hearted Mr. Osprey, who cares for her and her family with a perfectly crafted sense of nobless oblige; his cook, Mr. Chang -- and yet it is always the one searing detail that suggests the life in miniature. What we remember of Lydia and Raul's apartment is the window that for years has gone unwashed because of the bars protecting it. And what we learn about Lydia's hopes and dreams has to do with the investments she makes when a real windfall comes her way: a microwave oven, a subscription to Readers Digest, and a thousand-dollar donation to the local church.

It is hard not to love Lydia Espana by the end of her season, splendid, at least, within the caring province of Hijuelos's imagination. More determined than noble, Lydia is noble because of her determination -- and a constant reminder that poverty itself has no grand design, not when it comes to choosing victims.

Sometimes, despite all her boundless ``dignity'' -- that wondrous pride-saving province of the poor and working class -- she got up in the morning and vomited, not from morning sickness or from something she'd eaten, but out of a kind of despair, the ``bad nerves'' that come from getting down on one's knees to wipe clean a stranger's toilet; from swallowing one's pride, out of necessity.

Quite simply, she had turned around to find that Lydia Espana, from Cuba, the Empress of the Splendid Season as her husband once thought of her, had somehow become Lydia the Spanish cleaning lady.

Oscar Hijuelos, from ``Empress of the Splendid Season''