No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Among his other tunes Bobby Rodríguez had one which they liked even more. It was kind of a Charleston with a Latin tempo. “She’s a Latin from Manhattan” was like nothing they’d ever heard. They sang it in a chorus, all of them going crazy as they danced to it and sang to each other like it was a dialogue between several people:

  Fate

  Sent her to me

  Over the sea from Spain.

  Ah! She’s the one in a million

  For me.

  I found my romance

  When she went dancing by;

  Ah! She must be a Castilian,

  Sí, sí.

  Is she from Havana or Madrid?

  But something about her is making me doubt her,

  I think I remember the kid.

  She’s a Latin from Manhattan,

  You can tell by her “Manyana.”

  She’s a Latin from Manhattan

  And not Havana.

  Though she does the rhumba for us

  And she calls herself Dolores,

  She was in a Broadway chorus,

  Known as Susie Donahue.

  She can take a tambourine and whack it,

  But with her it’s just a racket,

  She’s a hoofer from Tenth Avenue.

  She’s a Latin from Manhattan,

  She’s a Forty-second Streeter,

  She’s a Latin from Manhattan,

  Senorita Donahue.

  One time when she was thirteen, her sisters Hilda and Nancy dressed Elsa up. They put lipstick and eye shadow on her and did her hair so that when she looked in the mirror she didn’t recognize herself. Her sister Milagros, who was married and pregnant with her first child, said she looked like Ava Gardner. Elsa felt her face get red and flushed, because Ava Gardner looked so beautiful in her films. The three of them had gone up to Hunter College for a Bobby Rodríguez concert—Hilda already engaged to be married and Nancy about to graduate from Seward Park. It was the first concert of any kind she’d gone to and she couldn’t believe how excited she felt, sitting in the dark, wanting to get up and dance, wishing Joey was there to dance with her.

  After Bobby Rodríguez y La Compañía played “She’s a Latin from Manhattan,” some homegirl interrupted Bobby Rodríguez while he was introducing the next number and said, “Why you gotta call the girl a hookah, huh? Why? Cause she’s Rican, huh?” Bobby had pointed his clarinet at the girl and said, “Not hooker, darling. Hoofer. A dancer.” And he made a little step and the audience applauded and then the orchestra played “El Número Seis” and Elsa couldn’t stop smiling she was so happy. She thought about what she’d say when answering Joey’s letter. He was in a place called Camp Lejeune.

  For a time she thought she’d like to become a dancer. She recalled Joey and herself, the two of them dancing the fast salsa numbers, spinning and twirling, her feet so quick and light and her entire body feeling smooth and easy as they went through the complicated steps, the two of them like they were electronically synchronized, so well did they anticipate each other. Whenever they went dancing, people moved into a circle to watch them do their routine. Joey even talked about starting an act or maybe competing in ballroom-dancing contests. Joey knew every dance there was, but salsa was his thing.

  Elsa loved those times with her homegirls, learning new steps and listening to records and laughing and carrying on. Her sisters all agreed that the girl in “Latin from Manhattan” had to be Rican.

  “She’s not from Havana or Madrid, right?” Hilda had said.

  “Yeah, right,” said Nancy.

  “And she’s a Latin from Manhattan.”

  “Yeah, so?” Milagros said, looking up from a book. “What’s that gotta do with it?”

  “What Latins we got the most of in Manhattan?” Hilda challenged, getting up from the couch. “Ricans, right?”

  “Yeah, right, but what’s this booshit about Señorita Donna Who?”

  Milagros said. “She lives on Fifth Avenue. That sounds like some rich girl to me.”

  “Oh, that just means they’re making fun of Americans, girl,” Nancy said.

  “Yeah, cause they can’t pronounce Dona and they’re trying to figure out who this girl that can dance up a storm is,” said Hilda, sitting back down.

  “She’s a Latin from Manhattan.” Nancy took up the argument once more. “She’s from El Barrio, from up there on Fifth Avenue, maybe around 110th Street. I can tell from her mañana, cause they probably picked up on our accent. They probably asked her when she could start and she probably said, ‘Yo, mañana,’ and whatnot. I’m sure when Bobby Rodriguez wrote the song he was talking about a homegirl called Suzy Dolores Rivera and they probably asked her mother’s name and she said Doña Moncha or Doña Suncha. And when the American didn’t understand, he said: Dona Who? So they call her Señorita Dona Who? Like, what do Americans know about our shit and whatnot?”

  That was as good an explanation as any, until last year, when Elsa was at a party out on Long Island at one of Barry’s friends’, and they were talking about old times, and Barry’s friend, Tony, brought out some old records and they played “She’s a Latin from Manhattan,” this more than twenty years after the concert. Everybody agreed that the girl had to be Puerto Rican except Nando Alvericci from WBAI, who had a Latin music show on Sundays. He was an authority on the history of Latin music. He said that the song was really about an Irish girl, Suzy Donahue, who’s trying to pass herself off as a Latin dancer called Dolores.

  “The song is from the thirties,” Nando said. “A show tune. I think it’s in a movie, but I can’t remember the name of it or who was in it. Bobby Rodriguez and La Compañía made it Latin. The girl’s Irish. Suzy Donahue.”

  Everyone questioned his opinion, but he asked everyone to listen to the lyrics more closely and each person at the party began to nod their agreement.

  “What’s this stuff about Fifth Avenue? That’s gotta be in El Barrio.”

  “The Irish lived on Fifth Avenue, up in Harlem,” Nando said. “In those days Fifth Avenue was Irish. Maybe being a Forty-second Streeter just meant that she was a Broadway dancer. Bobby didn’t write the song. I think the composer was Harry Warren.”

  They played the song three or four times in a row and she listened, feeling like somebody was forcing her to drink poison. But Nando was right. It was so clear. That the girl in the song was Irish made her blood boil.

  She went out on the back porch of the house and stared out at the sea, digging her fingernails into her palms in rage. Barry came out and asked her if she was all right, knowing she wasn’t and, beyond that, knowing it was best to leave her alone. He asked if she wanted a drink. She said scotch would be fine. A bottle if there’s one handy, she said. After Barry returned with a half-bottle of Johnny Walker Red and handed it to her, and then a glass, which she refused, she took off her sandals and went down the stairs to the beach.

  Dolores, she thought as she walked, tilting the bottle back and letting the liquor burn her throat, the alcohol making her woozy. She walked on and on, her feet digging into the now cool sand, the beach desolate as the sun began setting; walking and her heart raging at everything that was wrong with her life until the sun went down and she sat on the sand, drunk by then, and listened to the sea and cried. Billy Farrell, Irish. Suzy Donahue, Irish. Vidamía Farrell, her daughter, Irish. She was never prejudiced and now all this hatred was surfacing in her life, threatening to choke her, maybe turn her into a drunk. Wouldn’t that be lovely. The Irish were supposed to be the drunks, but P.R.s could outdrink the bastards any day. She lay down and heard the sea far away as she drifted off. When Barry and Tony found her, the incoming tide was lapping at her feet. A few more minutes and she would’ve been carried off, Barry later told her. He wanted to know what had happened, but she couldn’t discuss it with him. It had to do with Billy Farrell, and she didn’t want to talk about him.

  When Monday came she still couldn’t believe the entire matter of the song and canceled all her appointments for the
next two days as she made call after call to music stores, trying to get the sheet music to the song. She finally was able to get it at the Colony Record Shop, on Broadway at Forty-ninth. She looked at the lyrics and there she was, Suzy Donahue, except that the name on the music was spelled Susie, not Suzy. The more she read, the angrier she grew. She asked the man who’d brought her the sheet music about the song back in the thirties, expecting that somebody like Xavier Cugat had performed it. The man was in his seventies, gray hair and skin, his eyeglasses thick.

  “Jolson,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  “Al Jolson?” she said, unbelieving. “‘Old Man River’? … ‘Mammy’? … ‘Swanee’?” Her display of the knowledge of America made her feel as if she were superior.

  “That’s him. Nice Jewish boy from New York whose papa wanted him to be a cantor.”

  “Do you have the recording?”

  “I got a tape. You want it?”

  She nodded, and when the old man came back with the tape she took it and began to go into her wallet for her credit card, when she saw him reach up to adjust his glasses. As his sleeve crept up she noticed the faded blue numbers on his arm. Tears filled her eyes, the numbers reminding her of the fate of the parents of her old therapist, Barbara Gelfand.

  “He sang it in a movie,” the old man said.

  “Really?” she replied, feigning brightness. “The song? What was the movie?”

  He smiled, his dentures too large and yellow—she guessed the Nazis had probably pulled out all his teeth—and told her that the film was called Go Into Your Dance and featured Al Jolson, Ruby Keeler, Helen Morgan, Phil Regan, Barton McLaine, Patsy Kelly, Betty Rubin, and Glenda Farrell.

  “It was the only film Jolson and Keeler did together,” the old man said. “They were husband and wife.”

  “Really?” she said, once again annoyed, but not sure why.

  The coincidence of the name didn’t hit her immediately. She paid for her purchases, hailed a cab, and headed for Grand Central for her trip back up to Tarrytown. Once again she heard the lyrics in her mind, and the words cut through her. And then she heard the old man again reciting the names of the actors. Glenda Farrell. She couldn’t believe it. Farrell, like the William Farrell of her impulsiveness, of her bollo loco days. Irish. She read the lyrics on the sheet music and there it was. Of course. “Tenth Avenue …” Hell’s Kitchen! That’s where the little bitch lived. Passing herself off for a Latin, the cunt.

  As the train moved, she heard the lyrics again and felt her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands. “She can take a tambourine and whack it, but with her it’s just a racket … She’s a Latin from Manhattan, Señorita Donahue.” Who was Harry Warren? She was positive that, like Al Jolson, he must be Jewish and had simply changed his name.

  When she got home she made Barry sit with her and listen to the Al Jolson rendition of the tune. It sounded dopey, outdated, the Latin music like something out of a Carmen Miranda movie. The year was 1935 and they were making a movie with a song about a Latin in Manhattan. Some of the lyrics made her laugh, but the laughter hurt. Bobby Rodriguez’s version excluded certain lines but she couldn’t imagine why. Barry, who knew a little about music said maybe they didn’t fit with a salsa beat. He was right. I found my romance when she went dancing by. Ah! she must be a Castilian. Sí, sí.

  The next day, having induced sleep through a combination of pills, she went back into the city and went to the library and learned that Harry Warren had been born in Brooklyn. His parents were from Calabria, Italy. His name was Salvatore Antonio Guaragna. He was Italian.

  Harry Warren, who was Italian, wanted to be American. What did Señorita Donahue want? What did anybody want? Maybe Susie Donahue just wanted to eat good food and wear nice clothes and be around classy people, like she did. The recognition that her desires were so petty made her hate herself even more. She knew she had no burning desire, as a psychologist, to heal people. It was a means to an end. She wanted to be wealthy and forget where she’d come from. She heard the lyrics once more and then began drifting off.

  Though she does the rhumba for us

  And she calls herself Dolores,

  She was in a Broadway chorus,

  Known as Susie Donahue.

  Back then, Elsa and her homegirls left early in the morning, hauling big bags full of sandwiches, beach towels, and suntan lotion and combs and brushes and makeup, “darling, because you never know when some fine papi’s gonna come along and you looking like the Wicked Witch from the West Village, honey”; and giggling and talking loud about boys as they rode the Number 6 all the way up to Pelham Bay Park, thirty-five stops; refusing to take the express train, “because how you gonna go all the way up there to Orchard Beach standing up? Like, what am I, some sort of pendeja, I gotta stand up while all these blanquitas are sitting down warming their white culos? Fuck that booshit, girl.” Twelve or fifteen overactive Puerto Rican girls on the loose, talking all at once in English and Spanish, going back and forth from one language to the other with the ease with which they and their relatives went back and forth from the States to the island so that later on, when she was in college, she heard someone say at a party that with the money Puerto Ricans had spent on airfare coming and going between Puerto Rico and the States, they could have built themselves a bridge and simply driven to the island. But back then giggling and singing and playing handclapping games like they were still in grammar school. Lining up and down the middle of the subway car like a chorus line, while their big bags held their seats, they sang and danced to the Wallaby song.

  This is the way we wallaby, wallaby, wallaby.

  This is the way we wallaby all night long.

  Step back, Sally, Sally, Sally.

  Step back, Sally, all night long.

  I called the doctor and the doctor said,

  I got a pain in my stomach cause my baby’s dead.

  I got a pain in my side cause I went for a ride.

  I got a pain in my back cause I sat on a tack.

  Roll ’em, roll ’em, cigarette man.

  Or else they’d do a cheer they had learned in summer camp from a little blanquita-looking girl with blue eyes from Uptown that had a Rican father who’d married some white woman. The blanquita girl’s name was Ali Sue, some name like that, she thought. “And she was Rican?” somebody said. “Yeah, she speaks Spanish better than dopey Mandy Betancourt and her sister Connie who think they’re guineas and whatnot.”

  Eenie meenie pepsodeenie

  Ah bah boobaleenie

  Achy, pachy Liberace,

  Ann’s brother George got a peach, got a plum,

  Got a stick of cherry gum.

  And if you want one,

  This is what you say:

  Amen, Amen, A-mendiego, San Diego

  Hocus Pocus Dominocus

  Brave Eagles

  Sitting on a bandstand, beating on a tin can.

  Gees, gees, gees boom bah.

  Horses, horses, yah, yah, yah.

  Crazy-ass shit but she still remembered it all. Everything happened so quickly. One minute they were all girls wondering what boys were all about and the next they were women, all of them having done it, with differing degrees of success, some claiming that they couldn’t believe what the big deal was about and only a few, like Carmen Texidor, who was always the hippest of them and always reading weird shit, saying dopey things like, “Man, it’s better than ice cream, girl. You just gotta relax and tighten up your butt and move your thing.”

  And they all went, “What?”

  “Girl, wherechuget that?”

  And she said, “Cosmo.”

  And everyone looked at her like she was crazy.

  “Cosmo?”

  “Yeah. It says you tighten your butt like when you have to go caca and you don’t wanna let it go cause you in the elevator going to your house and whatnot.”

  They all giggled and looked at each other but they all started doing it in the park and Lily Betancourt said,
“Oh my God. Girl, that is too much. How much it costes, that magazine?”

  “What are you ohmygodding about, girl?” said Baby Contreras.

  And Carmen Texidor stepped in and said that maybe Lily was having a thing.

  “What thing?” they all said.

  “A orgasm,” Carmen said and they all went: “A what?”

  And now they really giggled and gave each other fives and pushed each other and Beatrice Cordero called it an oregano and that’s what they all began calling it and eventually read in Cosmo about multiple oreganos, which she herself now reported had happened with Billy Farrell when she had been on top of him and moving and all at once her tontón had started moving on its own and she could hardly breathe and all she could do was throw herself on him and hold on and her body felt like it was flying away from her and her head like it had gone totally blank so that when she told it all her homegirls looked at her with their mouths open and said things like, “For real?” But it stopped happening soon after for Elsa and hardly ever happened with Barry, except the first year or so. It didn’t matter. Her homegirls had all gone and gotten pregnant over and over; some of them had kids by three different guys and some didn’t even know who their kids’ fathers were. It was like she had started the whole thing with her stupid infatuation with Billy Farrell, damn him and his destroyed life.

  Twenty-two hours she had to wait for her to be born.

  6. Identity

  Finding her father and having another family gave Vidamía’s life a different purpose. It confirmed what she had always thought about her existence. It was like the proud feeling she experienced when she placed her hand over her heart each morning and pledged allegiance to the flag, or whenever they played the national anthem, believing in her fantasies that she was one of the drummer boys of the American Revolution, or a soldier in the Civil War, fighting on the side of the North because she felt so bad for the slaves, whose families were sometimes broken up—the mother going one way and the children the other and the father still another, all of them sold as property.