The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos Page A

María, in Cuba; there were the Hollywood films at the big movie house on Fordham Road; there were romantic novels; there were little boxes of bonbons; there were diaper-dragging two-year-olds toddling on the sidewalk outside her building; there were flowers in the park and pretty dresses in store windows. But there was nothing to overcome her feeling that the world was veiled by a melancholia which emanated from her poor father’s sadness. She was stoic enough that few things bothered her, and although she was at an age when young girls fall in love, she never dreamed about it, until one night, when she decided to follow her father to a dance hall.
     
    That night, while her father was out, Delores went searching the apartment for some paper and found a flier for the Dumont Ballroom on East Kingsbridge Road. She felt an overwhelming desire to see him. Dressed up, she walked down that steep hill, caught a Jerome Avenue subway north, and arrived at the ballroom. There she found herself in a zoot-suit haven of slick young men. Many of them were tough, lean veterans of the war who whistled at her and called out to her. Lines like “Enchantment, where are you going?”
    “Enchantment” found her father at the bar drinking, his shirt covered in sweat. He was talking to a woman who looked just the way Delores had imagined her. She was in her late thirties, quite plump, a little overripe in a cheap dress. She has the face of a whore, Delores had first thought, but when her father, acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary, introduced Delores to this woman, the woman’s face brightened with friendliness.
    “My, but you’re pretty,” the woman said to Delores.
    Delores blushed at the compliment. What could she be angry about? Her father had his arm wrapped around the woman’s fleshy hips. He was smiling in a way that she hadn’t often seen before, happily. And exhaustion had left his expression. What could she be angry about, at these two lonely people trying to comfort one another at a bar in a dance hall? Onstage, the orchestra was playing “Frenesí .” Her father leaned close to Delores and asked, “Delorita, what is it that you want?”
    “Papi, I want you to come home.”
    He didn’t even answer that, just made a looping motion with his cigarette and said to the woman, “Now, can you see that? My own daughter’s giving me orders. Me, the man.”
    Then he smiled.
    “Come on, don’t be like your mother.”
    Then the orchestra started to play a tango and the three of them stepped out into the crowd of shadows. Right then and there she saw that her father was a fabulous and graceful dancer, and that this dancing seemed to offer him release from his pain. He took hold of her by the hand and began showing her the three-strided slides of the tango. With her cheek pressed against his warm face, with the lights swirling about, and the perfume-scented shadows swarming around them, she had a daydream about dancing with him in that same way forever . . . Then the song ended and the woman came out to join them. Delores moved off to the side and watched as her father went back out onto the dance floor. Delores watched them spinning in circles. He was a good dancer. He did the lindy hop and the rumba and he jitterbugged with the best of them. Up on the bandstand, an outfit called the Art Shanky Orchestra, a troupe of pinstripe-suited musicians, were playing their hearts out. Their golden trumpets seemed magical because of the way they rejuvenated her father. He danced right into a spotlight and threw a silhouette that crept up the curtained walls of the dance hall a hundred feet high. A crooner got up and started to sing “Moonlight Becomes You.” That’s when her father and this woman went back to the bar. Exhausted by the fast dances, her father then said to his daughter, “This place isn’t so bad, now, is it?”
    He leaned with his back against the bar, and as the woman wiped off his forehead with a handkerchief