Of course, it was a lie, though I didn’t know it at the time. I can only suppose that he made up that fabrication to impress me, his American son. Maybe he did so because war was in the air—Vietnam was just gearing up, and some of the older boys in the neighborhood were going there as soldiers (a few, like Charlie Soto, coming back in a box)—but, even if some moment of patriotic fervor hadn’t compelled that story, I don’t know if he really believed he had anything glorious to report about his life.
“That’s really true—you were a sergeant?”
“Te juro.” And he crossed his heart. “I swear it’s so.”
That excited me, of course, and it left me buoyant. Expecting to go into the army myself one day, I was learning Morse code: I’d sent away for a dime pamphlet about telegraphy and, myopically already half-gone, my lenses as dense and heavy as the bottoms of whiskey glasses, I would sit up late at night, studying those dot dash permutations off a card, without a thought as to how the system had probably become outdated. Nevertheless, that revelation so thrilled me that I actually bragged about my father’s service to my friend Richard, from across the way. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked me, his mouth pursed skeptically as he took a drag of a cigarette.
Still, for weeks, I walked around convinced that he’d told me the truth, and rather proudly so, though, after a while, I couldn’t help but ask my mother about it. The exchange, as I recall, went as follows:
“Hey, Ma, was Pascual in the army during the Second World War?”
“Qué?”
“Was Pascual a soldier? You know . . .” And I made like I was firing off a rifle.
“Tu papá ? Un soldado? Nunca,” she said once she grasped what I was getting at. “Never!”
“But why would he tell me that?”
“Diga?”
I mustered some Spanish, poor as it was. With her, I always felt like a boat out in some dark bay, sending signals out to a distant lighthouse, always waiting for the light to beam on.
“Fue mentira?” I ventured.
“Si, hijo,” she said sadly.
“But why?” I asked.
“Por qué?” Her face went somewhere else and then she settled down.
She shrugged and rolled her eyes, and, in the only time I’d ever seen her do so, my mother, smiling, tipped her head back and, with her fist closed and thumb sticking out, as if she might otherwise be hitchhiking, raised and lowered her hand toward her mouth.
“But, hijo, don’t you know,” she said, “that he drinks too much?”—“Que tu papá bebe desmasiado?”
Okay: While I knew it, at the same time, a part of me continued to believe him—I couldn’t help it.
The hotel allowed him three weeks for vacation, which he always took in the summer, often while still moonlighting at his other job but still having enough of his days free to do what he most liked, which was to go to the beach, usually Brighton, out in Brooklyn. He’d take me along, when I was eleven and twelve, but never my mother, who preferred to stay at home. (Whether she wanted time off from him or not, she had a belief that too much sunshine would be bad for her skin, and in any case, my few memories of her at the beach always find her mainly under an umbrella, her arms and legs and face slathered with lotion.) We’d ride the fan-aired subway down there, always unbelievably hot, of course, and for these outings, I recall, he’d pack a bag of his favorite sandwiches: salami with pickles and mayonnaise on seeded hard rolls, about a half dozen of them (how less Cuban can you get?). He’d put on a pair of trunks (always oversized) in one of those sandy-floored men’s rooms that reeked of salt water, urine, cigar smoke, and compromised stomachs. Then, once I’d changed, we’d find some spot close to the shoreline, where he’d spread out a blanket, wanting to be near the murky water. He drank beers, which he’d bring along in a shopping bag—and in a pinch, there was always some enterprising chap clopping along the sand in a pith helmet and sandals, selling beers out of a Styrofoam cooler. I seem to remember that he also brought along a thermos—probably filled with whiskey, though I can’t imagine anyone drinking whiskey in that hot sun—and for my refreshments, a bottle of orange juice. Not one for luxuries of any kind, he’d pull from his bag a little plastic, cutting-edge-technology, made-in-Japan transistor radio, hardly much of anything at all, on which he’d tune into a Spanish-language station, a tinny, thin mix of boleros and cha-chas along with an endless promotional patter punctuating the waterside cacophony, similar radios sounding off from hundreds of blankets around us. He liked women, that’s for sure, his eyes never missing a buxom lady’s figure, big hipped or big bottomed or not, as she’d pass by or go wading into the water. Occasionally, he’d strike up a conversation with a woman if she were on a blanket nearby, and somehow, despite his girth, he’d cajole all manner of information from her—“Where do you live?” “What do you do?” “Oh, you have kids—I like kids”—the kinds of things I’d overhear him saying in Spanish. Not that he went off with anyone, but looking back now, I’m fairly certain that he enjoyed the pursuit. He did not swim—rather made his way into the water and plopped down into it, falling back on his hands, or else splashed himself with that foamy rush, always keeping an eye on me to make sure that I kept watch over the plump wallet he’d stash inside his shoes, under his shirt and trousers, on the blanket.
The waters off Brighton were not like those blue, crystal clear waters off the coast of Oriente, Cuba, but now and then, I’d catch him as he, sitting up, would look over the horizon with a mostly dreaming expression in his eyes, the way he would sometimes in our kitchen, as if, indeed, Cuba was not far away. He didn’t have a whole lot to say to me—we were, on those days, as my mother might remark, just being “muy, muy tranquilito”—and after a few hours, maybe four at most, during which I took a few tentative dips in the sea or else examined the half-dead grayish crabs washed up in the auburn sand, it would be time to head back. We’d dress in the same bathrooms and stop for a frankfurter along the boardwalk—and sometimes my father might linger by a railing to have a smoke, the Eiffel Tower–looking parachute drop in Coney in the distance, before setting out for the hour-and-a-half ride home. And while it wasn’t much as far as vacation days go—and we’d often repeat the same thing the next day—I enjoyed those outings very much, and think of them nostalgically now.
As I’d get older, we’d go up to the Bronx, a different story entirely, where he’d hang out with his friends at gatherings that began at about three or four on a weekend afternoon. Nothing fancy, they always started out agreeably enough with folks sitting around talking amicably, food, and a lot of it, served on paper plates off a buffet table, and some music blasting out of a record player or radio. Gradually, however, what with the men drinking so much and my father becoming more and more deeply implanted on a plastic-covered couch, I dreaded the moment when we’d leave, usually late at night. The journey home at two in the morning, with nary a taxi or gypsy anywhere in sight along those desolate streets, involved a trek down a long hill, past a row of abandoned buildings, in a fairly crime-ridden neighborhood, maybe number two or three in the city. Uptight and vigilant, I’d hold on to my father’s arm, with my pop completely out of it, trusting, even if he’d been mugged a few times before, that we’d manage to slip through to the kiosk stairway of the 169th Street and Third Avenue station without incident (if he thought about it at all). Once on the platform, we sometimes waited half an hour before a number 8 train would finally show up, and even then, that ride back to the West Side, with another wait at 149th’ and Grand Concourse, could take just as long. Somehow we’d always make it home.
But during those vacations what I enjoyed more at that age were the days when he’d bring me down to the Biltmore, where he’d go to pick up his pay (always in cash and in a letter-size manila envelope, weighted with small change). There was a little office–really a kind of booth—at the far end of a freight dock on the Forty-fourth Street side of the hotel, midway between Vanderbilt Avenue and Madison, that could be entered from
the sidewalk. And as my father would speak quietly with the payroll clerk—“This is my son, Oscar,” he’d say—I would watch the workers unloading vegetable crates and sides of white fatted beef from the backs of produce and butcher trucks, a process that somehow always enchanted me. Then we’d either go upstairs through a service entrance or make our way back around and walk in through the lobby, a busy place in those days; businessmen came flowing through its brass revolving doors, while bellboys in beige uniforms tended to opening taxi doors and to incoming luggage, groups of tourists and conventioneers milling about. The massive lobby’s carpeting was plush, and when you looked above, you saw on the ceiling an ornate Florentine-style fresco of gods flying through the heavens. Just beyond, behind an ornate grille, was a Havana-style palm court, and, of course, as that lobby’s centerpiece stood the famed Biltmore clock, with its banquette sitting area, much storied as a congenial spot for young couples to meet up for dates, or where college boys on the prowl might look for girls. (I didn’t know anything about the hotel’s history at the time—what could my father have told me?—but in conjunction with this writing, I found out that the hotel, some twenty-six stories high and taking up an entire block north of Grand Central, had been built by the Warren and Wetmore architectural firm in 1913, a few years before my father was born. Aside from being the kind of place where the Zionist Conference of 1942 convened and the World Center for Women’s Progress held its inaugural meeting, it was at the Biltmore where F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his honeymoon with Zelda.)
Inevitably, we’d end up inside the Men’s Bar or the Men’s Grill Room, which was entered a few steps down off the lobby through a door by which a sign was posted: NO WOMEN ALLOWED. I recall that it was an old-style oak-paneled room, quite dark and Edwardian in its motifs, its walls decorated with paintings of sporting scenes and nude women, a massive oak bar taking up much of the space, while off to the side were various booths. We’d go into the kitchen, at the back, where my father would say hello to his fellow workers, among them Díaz, the cubano. A plate-cluttered and steamy place with glaring overhead neon lights, that kitchen was filled with stainless steel counters, pots and pans hanging off racks, and fans set up here and there to offset the heat of ovens, grills, and deep fryer. A long banister divided the room. Among its appliances, which impressed me greatly, were a battery of six-slice toasters for the preparation of the bar’s famous BLT and club sandwiches. I can remember being treated quite well by the staff there—sitting on a stool in the back by a cutting board, watching them cook away, I’d have lunch, anything I wanted, though I distinctly recall always asking for the club sandwich, for we never ate bacon at home, and more than once, my father, a cigarette between his lips, officiated over the making of an ice cream sundae replete with hot fudge topping, whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry, which, placed before me, I devoured. Afterward, once he’d come back from the pantry, we’d head out—down into Grand Central to catch a shuttle to Times Square, and home.
He liked to read the Daily News, even the funnies, as if studying for a final exam, especially the sports pages, and always took a great interest in the Washington Senators baseball team, mainly because there were some Cubans in the lineup. He took me to see a Mets game once, when they’d just joined the National League and were playing the Senators, someone having given him the tickets at the hotel. (The Mets were horrible in those days and ever since I sat through that lackadaisical game, I’ve never cared much for the sport, I’m sorry to say.) Having worked a banquet held for a group of Japanese businessmen at the hotel, he came home with a five-thousand-yen note, and, truly believing it amounted to a lot of money, thought he’d have enough to buy a new television set, the sort that didn’t conk out suddenly, until he took the note over to an American Savings Bank on 111th Street and Broadway—now El Banco Popular—and found out that it, so valuable seeming, was worth only a few dollars. (I went with him, and embarrassed after speaking to the teller with whom he had tried to cash the note only to learn that cashing it would cost almost as much as it was worth, he shook his head and shrugged. What are you going to do, right?) In his wallet, for some reason, he carried around a bawdy cartoon, always folded up, that obviously gave him a kick. I came across it one day on his dresser. It was of two characters, Harry and Bert Piels, popular advertising mascots for the Piels beer company: They were both bald and somewhat professorial looking—one tall and lanky and the other short and squat. In the cartoon, the short one, with exclamation and question marks shooting out of his head, was locked in an embrace with a nude, buxom, Amazonian woman three times his size, his eyes fixed on her pointy breasts, and a thought balloon with the words “Oh boy, oh boy, now that’s even better than beer!” rising from his head. (Or something like that: Mainly, I wonder now why he carried it around in his wallet.)
Once, I found a twenty-five-dollar gold piece in the gutter. I have no idea how such a valuable thing happened onto the street, but when I brought it home to show my father, he told me, “Bien hecho”—“Well done”—and gave me a dollar for it. (For the record, I also found on the street a two-dollar Confederate bill, which, thinking it worth something, I kept for ages.)
We were always receiving visitors out of the blue—a lot of Cubans who’d recently turned up in the city, just like in the I Love Lucy show, which, by the way, my father liked to watch in the reruns. (With The Honeymooners, that was the only other show I remember his laughing aloud at.) One afternoon—I was about twelve—he received a few of these new guests: a plump dark-haired couple with an even plumper little girl, in from New Jersey, fresh up from Castro’s Cuba, who had heard about a Hijuelos living in New York City. My father was wearing checkered slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, and white tennis sneakers that day—he favored sneakers of any kind on his time off from the hotel, where he would have to stand constantly on his feet—and after bringing them some refreshments in the living room and conversing for a while, he, coming out into the hallway, called me in from my room, where I had been reading comics or doing whatever the hell it was that I would do. He didn’t often easily smile at me, but when I—in the midst of my early adolescent can’t-be-bothered-by-anythingelse stage—lumbered down the hall and the couple stood up as soon as they saw me, my pop, beside himself, bowed as if announcing some sixteenth-century courtier at the court of the Spanish king. In Spanish, he said, “Oscar Hijuelos, I am pleased to introduce you to Oscar Hijuelos,” for that was, indeed, the fellow’s name. Blinking affably, the other Oscar Hijuelos, who must have been about thirty at most, smiled and extended his hand to me for a shake. Then his wife by his side said, “Hola, pariente”—“Hello, relative”—and I shook her hand as well. We sat down for a while, the other Oscar Hijuelos (to this day I have no idea of the family connection) filling in my father on his doings in this country—I’d heard that kind of thing often, as if it were a drill: no job, no language, some help from Cuban friends, some from the government, the new world so strange, and yet, despite it all, somehow landing on one’s feet. That other Oscar Hijuelos, with his wife and daughter, stayed for about an hour. My mother never came home to meet them. And once they left, promising to return, they never did.
In the meantime, while all those things were going on, my brother was away in the air force, at first in Biloxi, Mississippi, then in Lackland, Texas, and eventually in one of the hell zones of the early sixties, London, England, as an air traffic controller. In that time, squeezed between one of those lackluster winter days in our household, when ice formed on the windowpanes, a great snow began to fall. My father, having to go to work, got up that morning with blistering pains shooting across his chest. When he raised his arms, those pains, like rods being jammed into his bones, fluttered down to the tips of his fingers, and even then, when he felt his arms going numb, he, sitting back on the bed, tried to work them out, flicking his wrists wildly, the way people do when their hands fall asleep. But when he tried to stand, it was as if he were carrying a piano on his shoulders. Lulling for a while, he lit
a cigarette. And then, taking a deep breath, as my mother dozed beside him, he managed to get to his feet. In the kitchen, searching a cupboard, he found some rum and, swallowing a huge swig, felt his body settling again. At a certain moment, down the hall in our dingy bathroom, the sweat on his face slackening off, he, feeling better and dressing, set off for work. He put on his hat, scarf, and London Fog overcoat, and, despite the snowdrifts, made his way across the Columbia campus to the subway, eventually to the hotel, where he, with those nagging pains in his chest, somehow made it through the day.
I remember nothing of that evening after he’d come home, except that he had gone to bed early. There he had lain all night, tossing and turning and gasping—according to my mother—and while a lovely snow continued to fall, come the next morning, at about five, when my father would usually awaken, he simply could not move. My mother, loving—and hating—him so much, prevailed upon our gentle across-the-hall neighbor, Mrs. Blair, on whose door she banged at that unearthly hour, begging to use her telephone to call Dr. Altchek in Harlem. That great old man, however disturbed from his sleep, turned up by six—I remember that under his topcoat, he wore pajamas—and within a few moments after making some examinations, he, as he had done with me those years before, declared that my father, having suffered a heart attack, should be rushed to the hospital.
That whole interlude of his initial recovery, during which my father spent some three weeks in a fifth-floor room of the Flower Memorial Hospital on Fifth Avenue and 105th Street (thank God for union insurance coverage) with a lovely view north over Central Park, I have to skirt. I will say this: He had his transistor radio to keep him company and, thinned down somewhat with the hospital diet, seemed to be extremely well. I sat by him on numerous afternoons, watching so many of his friends from the hotel and from around come by to greet him. After working more or less steadily at the hotel since 1945 or so, he seemed grateful for the time off, for the outpouring of visitors, and would sit up, smiling in his hospital pajamas, and somewhat optimistically, despite the IV line in his arm. My mother, at least when I was there, never came, not that I remember, though she surely must have. At one point he told me, “Whatever happens to me, take care of your mother.”