NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  I peered. She was reading Isaac Rosenfeld’s story “The Colony.” I could smell her hair, brown and glossy as her moccasins, freshly washed and brushed to the alpaca collar of her gabardine storm coat. I breathed deeply, trying to screw up courage, I had no idea where I was, the car gradually emptied out, she was lovely, I remained desperately at her side until at last she arose, swaying to the squeal of the brakes as gracefully as Cleopatra on her barge, still apparently unaware of my presence, her index finger slipping between the pages of the magazine to mark her place. There was nothing else to do, I lurched after her as the double doors opened for us.

  “What do you make of that Rosenfeld story?” I heard myself croaking in an unnatural voice.

  For the second time, she glanced at me. Her face was rather broad and pale, quite Slavic, with prominent cheekbones and a small but proud nose the wings of which now dilated. If she walked away, I was cooked. If she replied coldly, I could at least keep on talking for a while. What she did, after an endless moment, was to smile.

  We mounted the steep steps to the street. What was this? Nothing but black faces. One-hundred-and-tenth Street, yes; but not the Morningside Heights I had expected.

  “What’s the matter, don’t you know where you are?”

  “It’s all your fault. But I don’t care, if you hadn’t gotten off here I’d have ridden out to the end of the line.”

  We had coffee in a White Tower filled with leather-jacketed Negro laborers. Her name was Pauline Friede, she was quite fresh out of college, and she worked as an investigator for the Department of Welfare. We couldn’t stop talking, we had so much to say. I walked her slowly to her first client, and it took us ten minutes to say goodbye.

  The next time we met, I kissed her in the subway, to commemorate our first encounter and salute our mutual courage. Ordinarily I hate that sort of thing, but now everything was fluttering and flying inside me, birds, balloons, pennants, all set loose. She flung her soft hair free from the collar of her coat, and the flesh of her arms inside the sleeves was warm and pulsing beneath my fingers.

  Thank God I had the apartment. What did they do, young New Yorkers in love and needing to be alone together? When I had been a soldier, or visiting as a student, it had been difficult enough, hunting for privacy with a girl—cruising the rainy streets in a taxi, clutching and moaning while the meter ticked away; grappling in the back row of a movie house, trying to work up the nerve to try a hotel; phoning from a United Cigar Store to plead for the loan of a friend’s apartment, while the girl waited, wretched and frightened, at the chewing gum counter. With Pauline I couldn’t have done those things.

  Yet I would have had to do something. Pauline still lived with her parents and a high-school brother on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. The brother was all right, he was still young enough to be awed by combat veterans, and her mother was actually rather sweet for a big woman, with an air of resigned defeat that invariably aroused in me a lively sense of guilt (she had a way of smiling shyly at me, as much as to say, Since you know that I know that you’re sleeping with my daughter, maybe the knowledge will make you chivalrous and responsible). But her father, who ran a small men’s-furnishings shop on Fordham Road and was still sweating out shortages (first of customers, now of white shirts), was virtually humpbacked, astigmatic in more ways than one, and monumentally opinionated. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it wasn’t that the opinions were invariably secondhand, borrowed from the columnists and commentators to whom he was addicted as other men are to girls or gambling. I used to have to listen, bored and needing other news and advice, to Gabriel Heat-ter, Lowell Thomas, Elmer Davis, Raymond Gram Swing, H.V. Kaltenborn, and Drew Pearson. At the end of the evening, when Pauline and I wanted most to be alone, there would be angry, incoherent letters to the editors of Reader’s Digest and the New York Post, read by that indignant correspondent, Pauline’s father, with fervor and sharp snaps of his dentures between sips of tea and swallows of spongecake.

  Within two weeks after we had met, Pauline had a key to my apartment. Occasionally we would make primitive dinners there on a gas burner I had on top of the dresser. Invariably we would make love. And talk. Since it seemed impossible that there could ever come a time when we would have nothing left to say to one another, and since the warmth of my little Brooklyn Heights flat as we rocked in each other’s arms was infinitely preferable to the clammy chill of the Woodlawn express rocketing us miserably to her parents’ home at three o’clock in the morning, nothing was more logical than that we should get married as quickly as possible.

  If Pauline had lived alone, if her family were in Cincinnati instead of the Bronx, then perhaps she would simply have moved in with me and we would have put off marriage for a while. But since we also hoped that there were no impediments to our love (Pauline had had a wartime romance, but when she learned by V-mail that her boy friend intended to marry an English WAAF before her pregnancy became too pronounced, she was not only not heartbroken, but enormously relieved), there was no impelling reason for us not to get married.

  We were self-conscious about appearing corny and cocksure—that was strictly for the squares who had really hurried home to mom’s cooking and the salesman-trainee’s job, and to their steady girl friends, who had waited bravely for the wagon-wheeled development cottage. Besides, we were more than a little frightened, with good reason. I was too used to living alone or with men in a barracks (which came to the same thing), she was too used to living with her loving family. So our first months together were hard. Yet we stayed in love, a marvel in itself, and meanwhile, other things were happening.

  For one thing, I found Barney again. When I went overseas he had apparently gotten my APO number fouled up. His last letter had informed me that he was getting his Master’s in math, and maybe he could go all the way to his Ph.D. if I would go on fighting for him, and if his own draft board didn’t catch up with him. Then silence.

  Pauline and I had gone to the City Center to hear Bernstein conduct the New York City Symphony. We sat with the eager girls, the fans up in the second balcony, yelling “Lenny! Lenny!” as though they were at the Paramount. When we came downstairs at intermission and stepped out into the chill night air of Fifty-fifth Street for a smoke, there was Barney, a head taller than any of the chattering young fairies or serious young couples around him. He hadn’t changed at all. His black eyebrows still grew together over that nose like a knife, a little Between the Acts cigar still stuck out between those thin lips.

  We caught sight of each other at the same instant, and lunged forward through the crowd that separated us. Then we were embracing, and laughing with sheer delight that the war had not conquered our friendship.

  “I knew it,” I said happily. “I told Pauline that if I’d go to enough concerts, I’d find you.”

  “Stop!” he commanded. “Halt! Let’s get organized. Meet my girl, while I meet yours. This is Cordelia Spencer.”

  She looked very fine, the girl he produced as if he were drawing her from his raglan-sleeved topcoat. Tall herself, almost my height, she half-concealed her very blonde straight hair, which she wore long (although long hair hadn’t quite come in yet), beneath a wispy silk scarf looped over her head, around her throat, and over her left shoulder. Young, but expensive-looking and enormously self-possessed.

  “My roommate, my conscience,” Barney was explaining to her as I took her gloved hand. “Always after me about matters political.”

  “I’m still ahead of you, Barney. Pauline and I are married.”

  “Dog!” Barney cried. “Dog! Without asking for my approval? But such luck! I don’t suppose he told you, Pauline, that he was drummed out of Omicron Nu for cheating at solitaire. Or that he joined the army after he was jilted by a Siamese.”

  “I am trying to make it up to him,” Pauline murmured modestly.

  “For that a kiss, even if I wasn’t invited to the wedding. Pucker up, Pauline.”

  He kissed her good, too, in all that crush, an
d didn’t stop until, with everyone around us watching and laughing, Cordelia plucked him by the arm. “Hey, you never treat me like that.”

  “You’re not married.”

  We were reluctant to separate, even for an hour. Impatiently we sat through the second half, and then went together around the corner to the Russian Tearoom, where we caught up on the years of separation over tea and baklava. We were rewarded for our extravagance: Marian Anderson sat regally with S. Hurok only two tables away from us.

  From then on we four were together more evenings than not, and usually on week ends too. Often there would be others—William Jennings Bryan Oberholser (we called him Peerless Willie), who was getting his Ph.D. at Columbia in history, taught at Brooklyn College, and turned up with an infinite variety of girls, of all shapes and sizes; a clever young couple name of DeFee, designer and interior decorator respectively, friends of Deelie’s; a reckless cousin of mine called Zack, who was writing a war novel about the South Pacific, where he had led several let’s-go-home demonstrations. But we four were the nucleus, or we considered ourselves as such, which was what mattered; for we were the ones who made the big decisions on eating, playgoing, parties, and most important, whom we would invite on our outings.

  I have the photos yet of Barney and me in slapstick Abbott and Costello poses, of Pauline and Deelie with their arms linked, of Peerless Willie muzzling a babe in the course of a picnic at Fort Tryon Park when we tramped through the Cloisters and hung from the palisades over the Hudson. I cherish too the snapshot Barney took of me, with Pauline and Deelie on either arm, at the bow of the old One-hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street ferry, trying to look like a New Jersey Viking, but doubled over with laughter. What were we laughing at? I don’t remember, we laughed easily and often. And there is a red rectangular folder with eight serrated snapshots, memento of one Sunday when we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. It started with late breakfast at our place on Remsen Street; then around noon we’d meander over the little Penny Bridge at the foot of Montague Street and on through the broken-down bars and vague-eyed derelicts of Myrtle Avenue and Sands Street (all gone now, replaced by handsome characterless courthouses and office buildings), on to the great bridge. So there are pictures of Barney and me cavorting, of Deelie and Pauline strolling like models on the promenade, of us all lined up before the struts with the marvelous skyline and the springtime sun behind us, our faces half in shadow but leaning forward to the camera’s eye in hope and expectation.

  But I have no pictures of Barney at work in the North Jersey research lab that was deferring him, of Deelie trying to make it on the Broadway stage without seeming eager or obvious, of the inner texture of Pauline’s life and mine.

  This last was what was most extraordinary about all our days. Beyond the bickering over my enforced Friday evening visits to the Friedes, where I would sit, a miserable captive of my father-in-law’s complaints and commentators, and our slow, almost imperceptible adjustment to each other’s private rhythm, we discovered that our work and our play, our jobs and our personalities, came to complement each other so well that we were almost frightened by our happiness.

  As the weeks went by and we grew more confident about our jobs, we tried to gain some control over where we would be sent. I could usually switch with several enumerators, if not Dante Brunini, a sharp young Italian actor with a game leg, then Herman Appleman, a ruddy-cheeked ex-paratrooper bucking for a G.I. loan to go into the photographic supply business. With their cooperation I worked out my field schedule so that I could see New York as few people had seen it before or ever will again; and I was able not only to meet Pauline at the end of the day, but sometimes to set off with her in the morning, and often to go with her in the evening after supper while she visited a family or I caught up with some of those in my sample who were out during the day.

  So Pauline and I would meet on the streets of the city as we had first found each other below the ground. Briefcases in hand, we would hasten off together to dinner through the twilight of Red Hook, Ridgewood, or East Harlem; and after we had eaten, I would drowse at a bar over television (still a barroom novelty) while Pauline, her heart aching, would be struggling with the problems of bewildered refugees afflicted with cancer and layoffs. If I was the one who had to work, Pauline would read Mary McCarthy in a cafeteria while I mounted the steps and soared in the elevators to enter for a moment the worlds of the New Yorkers of all kinds who opened their doors to me.

  They were becoming a very intimate part of my life, these citizens whom I would visit, pad in hand, to inquire whether there had been a change from one month to the next in the household, job status, hours worked, income earned.

  An old Italian lady of Bay Ridge with a hairy chin and a blinking smile, who forced jelly beans on me while she answered my questions and continued to work at the kitchen table, wedging bobby pins onto cardboards for the neighborhood notions store.

  A youngish woman of the rooming-house type with fine legs and hair dyed the color of newly minted pennies, who always opened her door furtively to me, as though I were a secret lover. After the first few monthly visits, I was just as furtive, because her husband, a slippered, scant-haired crank with a bitter eye and mouth, both pulled down at one corner by a stroke, would invariably kick me out if he heard my voice. “So it’s Henry Wallace’s stooge again.” Useless for me to explain that Wallace was not my boss. “Go on, get out of here. There’s no law says we have to answer.”

  A wholesale diamond merchant in a sunken living room in River House, rising every month to greet me punctiliously across half an acre of Baluchistan carpeting, and to offer me a glass of port while he told me politely of his job status.

  A Jewish FBI agent, self-satisfied but wary, who always took me confidentially into his kitchenette to explain that it was a state secret, he couldn’t even estimate how many hours he had worked, and that he was always just a phone call away from hardship and hazard. He grew morally outraged, agitatedly fingering his little mustache, when I finally ventured to suggest that it sounded like an ideal job, no questions askable, for a husband who wanted to play around.

  A suave importer of Parisian negligees who refused to answer my questions but instead questioned me about my education, my army record, my ambitions, and finally offered me a job at his Fifth Avenue salon with, he assured me, an unlimited future.

  This one Pauline laughed about. It was funnier than the pathos she had to live with in her own work. “Imagine somebody asking you what you do, and you saying, I’m in ladies’ underwear!” That wasn’t the only reason, though. It was more that we couldn’t imagine ourselves doing anything else but what we were, or living any place on earth but in New York—and the importer had thrown out as bait that if I came to work for him he would be sending me to Paris on occasion. Paris? I had had my bellyful of Europe, and it was only afterwards, years later, when Pauline and I began to dream of traveling abroad, that we bethought ourselves of the negligee importer, and began to wonder what it would have been like, living in Paris during those years …

  It was bitter for Pauline, a soft and gentle girl, to meet misery every day; clever and attractive as she was, Deelie hadn’t yet found herself, as the saying went (nor had I, for that matter); and Barney was marking time until he could be released to pick up his career. Nevertheless our lives were good. The very air smelled of freedom and hope. What more can you want?

  Barney lived at home with his parents in Flatbush, but Deelie had inherited a tiny little place in the Village, on Gay Street, from a friend who had given up the theater for marriage and Long Island. When the four of us were together in that dark, narrow little alcove it was jammed, but it was a place to go, and I think Deelie and Barney were happy there.

  They used often to meet us in Brooklyn Heights, since our place was more or less midway between Flatbush and the Village. Not just for Sunday breakfast and the walk across the Bridge, but in the evenings too. Deelie would curl up catlike on the studio couch, purring and sleek in her
stockinged feet, awaiting the arrival of Barney, his pockets loaded with delicacies lifted from the fancy goods counters of Gristede’s and Esposito’s. We divided the labor equitably: Barney the burglar earned relaxation with PM, while Deelie set the card table, Pauline opened the mulligatawny soup and heated it on the burner, and I worked the coloring agent into a bowl of white margarine. Throughout these unbalanced meals, the anchovies, smoked oysters, and Argentine ham augmented by a Mason jar full of chopped herring from Barney’s mother or a bowl of jelly cookies baked by Pauline’s mother, we argued politics and hashed over the day’s doings.

  Deelie had a three-day job at a private gallery, mostly cataloguing and mailing out announcements, and she filled the week with volunteer work for a ladies’ organization that did good deeds for wounded veterans. There was neither money in one nor satisfaction in the other, but Deelie’s people in Greenwich had money anyway, and she took her pleasure from Barney, his quick mind and cutting humor, and from her theatrical expectations. If she didn’t make it in the theater she was bound to make it somewhere. She was good-looking and had an elegant figure; and even if for me she was not sexy, not as Pauline was, with her brooding eyes and those nostrils which flared as her passion mounted, yet she was undeniably desirable, smelling as she did of money and challenging all men with her self-assurance. She had gone for a while to Bradford Junior College and then to Bennington College; the traditional upper-class upbringing, overlaid with a patina of avant-garde ambition, was captivating to Barney, whose experience hadn’t ranged, to my knowledge, much beyond flat-heeled girl radicals and harpsichord players. Deelie was fun. She was also anxious not only to be one of us but to be good to us. And she was, in many little ways: she passed on to Pauline “extra” cashmere sweater sets given her by spinster aunts; she gave us theater tickets, which she insisted she had gotten for nothing; and one memorable week end she hauled us off in her cousin’s jeep to his wonderfully isolated and comfortable summer place out at Southampton.