Because I was twenty-seven years old before I ever entered the Delgado Ballroom, my shirt size determined years, my waistline fixed and what length pants I wore. No youth but callow still, the city hick, a sort of pleasantry. (You will understand that I played softball with what I still called “the men” on Sunday mornings in the schoolyards and parks, everyone, me too, in a yellow T-shirt and baggy baseball trousers, beer on the sidelines and packages of cigarettes and the equipment in someone’s old army duffel.) We bloom late into our mildness, or some do, our character only a deference, a small courtesy to the world.
We played softball — slow pitch, the high and lazy arc of the big ball so casual the game seemed to go on over our heads. Softball is a pitcher’s medium, slow pitch especially. I thought the pitchers rich, or anyway leaders, privileged, gracious. They gave us our turn, permitted us to stand beneath the big, deceptive, graceful ball, shaking into our stance like dogs throwing off water, seeking purchase, hunching our shoulders, planting our feet, hovering in gravity as the softball hovered in air. Neutral gents, those pitchers neither smiled when they struck us out nor frowned when we connected. Good sports acknowledging nothing, neither the hoots of their opponents nor the pepper encouragements of their mates. Captains of cool benevolence, trimmer than the beefy Polacks and Krauts, all those swollen, sideburned others who were always talking.
In that league if you weren’t married you were engaged. Engagements seemed to generate themselves almost spontaneously. There wasn’t, except for myself, a fellow who wasn’t already, or who wouldn’t within the year become, a fiancé. Every girl on the bus wore a ring. Rings, or at least high school graduation pins, were an article of clothing, a piece of style, as much a part of ordinary human flourish as a cross on a chain. They were serious people, with their scouts’ eyes peeled for the sexual or domestic talent. It was a world of starter sets, registered taste, the future like a lay-away plan.
Those pitchers, I’m thinking of those pitchers, the men chosen to get the blessings. Maybe because I didn’t grow up there, maybe because when I came they were already doing their lives. Maybe it’s having to come from behind (who came from behind history itself; oh, Greatest Grandfather, why didn’t you rise up and smite Guillalume and the merchant? why didn’t you kill Mills’s horse when you had the chance?) which blights possibility and poisons will.
What I wanted to tell her about was the Delgado Ballroom — soft romance’s dark platform, that marble clearing, that courtyard of the imagination, that dance hall of love. No playground or rec room, no nightclub or fun house. Consecrate as confessional, the priests came there, marriages were performed, girls confirmed, classes graduated.
I saw it first in the daytime when it had that odd, off-season calm of deserted amusement parks, unoccupied classrooms, restaurants with the chairs bottom up on the tables, all the wound-down feel of an energy absent or gone off to catch different trains. Maybe I was moving a piano. (This was what I knew of the high life, my stage door connection to the extraordinary, who brought cargoes of sand to the carpeted shores of the country clubs and filled the deep ashtrays there. George Mills, high placed as a head waiter, situate as a man in an honor guard. George Mills, the Velvet Rope Kid.) Or buffing the dance floor. Or installing the Coke machine. It was darker in the morning than it would have been at night, the windowless room cool as a palace. The manager gave me two passes. “Here,” he said. “Bring your girl.”
I went the following Saturday, who not only had no girl but who had never danced, whose music — the tuner on my little Philco was busted, the dial stuck just off key of a station that broadcast the Browns games, so that the play-by-play seemed to occur in a shrill wind, the star-of-the-game interview overseas — was mostly whatever people happened to be whistling, the pop tunes reaching me downwind, degraded, in a sort of translation, the melodies flattened, the high notes clipped. But I was twenty-seven years old, my Sunday mornings squandered in playgrounds with “the men,” those imaginary big brothers of my heart. I didn’t even own a suit. (And what did I own? Not my furniture, not my knives and dishes, not my sheets and pillowslips. I think I had bought — let’s see — a shovel, a hammer, a tape measure and hand saw, my fielder’s mitt of course, my baggy baseball pants and spiked shoes, my cap and my T-shirt, a Louisville Slugger, a sixteen-inch softball. Even the Philco was furnished. I honestly can’t think of anything else. Yeah, the mismatched clothes in my drawers and closets.)
I went to Famous and Barr to be outfitted for my free passes, and when the salesman in Men’s Furnishings asked if he could help me I think I told him just that, that it was for the free passes I’d come, to be outfitted, done up like the box steppers in the Delgado Ballroom. I didn’t even understand about alterations, you see, and thought the trousers and jackets he had me try on cut for bigger, taller men. “I can’t buy this,” I told him, glancing at myself in the three-paneled mirror (and the first time, too, I had seen myself in profile, in holograph, maybe the first time I understood I had sides, a back). “I already told you it was for dancing. I’d trip on the whaddayacall’em, the cuffs.”
The tailor told me I could pick the suit up Thursday. (And that was something, I tell you, the dapper Italian with pins in his mouth, chalking my crotch. “Stand still,” he demanded. And the century’s squirming, woebegone hick replied, “I can’t, I can’t.”) “But I need it tonight. Tonight is the dance.”
“Tonight? Tonight is impossible. On Special Rush maybe late Wednesday morning. Wear something else.”
And I had to tell him I had nothing else, only my work clothes, only my work boots, only my softball gear, only my cleats. Only not entirely the hick. The hick is without my margin of peremptory foreboding, my self-serving ingenuousness. He does not throw himself so easily on the mercy of the court.
“It’s for tonight, you see. The dance at the Delgado. The manager invited me. He said to bring a girl. I could meet one. I don’t own the right clothes.”
“Hey, Albert,” the tailor said.
“Yeah, Sal?” said the salesman.
“Thirty-two years in the business and Cinderella here thinks I look like a fairy godmother.”
“You going to fix him up, Sal?”
“What the hell, Albert, I’m going to put it on Super Special Crash Rush and see to the alterations personally.”
“That’s wonderful, Sal. I know my customer appreciates that.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I want to thank you.”
I sat on the little bench in the tiny dressing room two hours, my curtain open to the weather of the other customers, men with wardrobes, with three and four and five suits in their closets, with dressy slacks and sports coats, with — I didn’t know this then — tropical-weight worsteds for the warm seasons, heavy tweeds for the cold, who examined themselves imperially in the glass and spoke without looking at them to the salesman at parade rest behind their backs, scrutinizing the mirror close as shavers or people examining blemishes in a good light. They talked knowledgeably about buttons, the slant of a pocket, the cut of lapels, and I, alien as a savage, listened greedily. I couldn’t have been more interested if they had been women.
“Hey,” Sal said, when he came down to check a customer’s measurements, “it’s going to be a while yet. You don’t have to hang around here. Walk around the store.”
“I’m all right. This is fine.”