Pete Hamill - North River

Then they reached Fifty-first Street.

“Here we are,” Delaney said, and looked up at the sign.

She followed his look, and moved a hand gently to his neck.

“Goddamn you,” she whispered in a hoarse voice. “You should of told me.”

They paused while she wiped her cheeks dry with a small frilly handkerchief. Then they walked together into Roseland.

There were no empty tables or chairs and the bar was packed, so they went directly to the crowded dance floor. There must have been eight hundred people in the place, old people and kids, many red from the sun, most sweating, some pressed hard against each other. The lights were muted. The band was playing “You Made Me Love You.” He put his right hand on her waist and took her right hand in his left, and they began to move. A fox trot. He could feel her tension, her fear of clumsiness, and he was careful not to step on her feet. She was smaller in his arms than she seemed in bed. At first Rose maintained a formal distance between them, and then as she relaxed, she pressed against him. Everybody seemed to know the words of the tune.

Rose whispered the words too, and then Delaney followed. A mustached young trumpet player played a solo without changing the beat, and when the tune ended, there was loud applause. The dancers were making clear that they wanted nothing complicated, nothing sweaty. They wanted romance. So did Delaney and Rose. Here they could be in the real world and still be intimate. Here, for a few hours, they could believe that they would be together forever.

And so they danced and danced, Rose growing more skillful as she went along, more relaxed, following his body and the slight pressure of his hands, then trying small moves of her own. “You know how to do this,” she said. “You must’ve done it with a lot of women.”

“But never with you,” he said. “And not for a long, long time.”

In the midst of the intimate crowd, and the music, and the sound of sliding shoes, he realized that strangers probably saw them as an older man with a handsome younger woman. Which was true. Or as a boss with his secretary. Or even as husband and wife, as the man believed at the museum. And why not? His hair was whitening and hers was a lustrous black. She will outlive me, if she has any luck at all. She will not outlive the boy. If the boy’s luck holds too. Then the set ended, many dancers applauded, the band stood up, and a four-piece combo replaced them. They started playing Dixieland. Rose took Delaney’s good hand and moved off the floor.

“Wait here for me,” she said. “I got to go to the ladies’ room.”

He stood next to a pole and watched her walk away. So did some men and a few women. Then she was gone, and he watched a dozen older couples doing the Charleston, crossing hands from knee to knee, laughing, happy, indomitable. They were his age, at least. For these precious moments they could forget the bad times. They could forget defeat. Once they were young. Once they had danced. They were doing it again.

From the packed bar he heard trills of bright female laughter, and male growls, and more laughter. Maybe the whiskey was laughing. But maybe it was just people having a good time, making loss into triumph, sorrow into life. Tonight was last night’s tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day. Or night.

The Dixieland band departed, and the house band of Larry Ellis returned. The oldest player was hauling a bass fiddle. He was about thirty. They started to play “Stormy Weather” just as Rose returned.

“More women in there than at S. Klein,” she said. “Powdering their nose, spraying themselves. Talking about men. Nothing else! Men and men and men.”

Delaney laughed. “As long as they weren’t talking about baseball.”

“Come on, Fred. Let’s dance.”

“Whatever you say, Miss Del Rio.”

They danced along with hundreds of others, and eased without effort into “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” Long extended versions, not the clipped three minutes of phonograph records, with each of four musicians taking a solo, on trumpet, clarinet, trombone, and tenor sax. Delaney thought: I have lived too long in the country of numbness. I won’t live there again. I want to become a citizen of Roseland.

“Compared to you, that Fred Astaire is a show-off,” she murmured.

“Compared to you, Dolores Del Rio is ugly.”

“You are a liar.”

Then a singer came onstage, skinny, in a jacket a size bigger than he was, black hair, high cheekbones. He was holding a microphone. Without introduction he began to sing in a thin intense voice.

Some of the dancers took up the lyrics.

Now the dancers were louder.

They all knew the next verse, even Delaney, and all of Roseland was singing it, except Rose. She didn’t know the words.

They roared the final lines, living tough and laughing at the whole goddamned world.

“Who is this Wop?” Rose said.

“I doubt he’s without papers. The voice is pure New York.”

“His mother should be ashamed. That kid needs to eat! ”

The young singer began a version of “Melancholy Baby,” somehow making the words romantic without being sentimental. The voice was urban, pure, new. Not Crosby. Not Russ Columbo. Definitely not Jolson. Delaney was sure his father was a fireman or worked three days a week in a factory. And thought: The strongest oak must fall. He pushed his face into Rose’s hair, inhaling the aroma of soap and oil. One ballad led to another for more than fifteen minutes. Then the singer said into the microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen, the national anthem.”

Without missing a beat, he began to sing, while the band supported him with a kind of Times Square dirge.

Some of the older men, the men Delaney’s age, stopped dancing. They knew this song too. They knew every word because in a big way, it was about them.

The singer was crooning the song, making it into a kind of blues, and more and more people stopped dancing and started singing.

Delaney and Rose were not dancing now either, and as they looked around and the verses continued he could see the anger in the men and some of the women. Many men punched out each word with a clenched fist. Some of them surely had been shot at. Some of them surely had been hit. Delaney thought: This singer must have been four when the war ended. Same as Grace. And yet he is making it his song too.