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 drilclass="underline" 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.