Barney leaned over to me, his eyes gleaming. “Break down, sourpuss. Admit you’re having fun, you retired world-saver.”
“Wait a minute,” I replied, half-laughing, half-annoyed. “You were the one, just the other—” But then I felt Pauline pulling ever so slightly at my arm, and I stopped. She was more sensitive than I. Barney was happy, and there was no sense in my spoiling things.
After two ballads we moved on in the wake of Willie and his fiancée. Suddenly I realized that the street was coming alive, for blocks, with the same noise from dozens of portable radios, some sitting on the curb, some wobbling on plank counters and plugged into the sockets of the haphazard overhead wiring, some perched on the window sills of the tenements that went up story after story into the night. They were all tuned to the broadcast of the Graziano-Zale fight.
I don’t remember which of their three fights it was—it doesn’t make any difference, they were all good—but the whole neighborhood was for Rocky Graziano, the crowds shoving good-naturedly the width of the street, the busy women cooking and the men in their undershirts deep-frying, the kids running loose, the old folks leaning out the windows. Tony Zale was well liked, but Rocky was their boy. We followed the mounting roar from radio to radio, stand to stand, block to block.
The tension was infectious, particularly for Dante. Cutting in front of us in the littered street, he began to bob and weave before Barney, his trousers tangled with red and purple streamers.
“Come on, boy,” he challenged, “you be Tony, I’ll be Rocky.”
Barney was a little embarrassed. He was still gay, but not quite sure of what he ought to do. He jabbed out tentatively, defensively, with a stiff left arm. “Don’t pick on me,” he said. “I never had a lesson in my life.”
“I’ll give you some lessons, Tony!” Dante cried, dancing forward. “Watch for my counter punch!”
“Let him have it, Rock!” A gang of kids, bored with each other, had already ringed Dante and Barney and the rest of us, and made our progress more difficult. “Give him the old one-two!”
Encouraged by the sudden support of new fans, Dante squirmed up and down, trying to move in rhythm to the announcer’s shrill recital of Graziano’s lefts and rights to Zale’s head and body. But his game leg was giving him trouble, although he tried to ignore it. Barney, sensing this, could not proclaim its obviousness by refusing to horse around with Dante. So he continued to respond with a halfhearted flailing of his long thin arms. Dante stumbled, perhaps because the kids, yelling encouragement, were now so close at his back, and fell into the path of one of Barney’s sweeping gestures. The open hand caught him across the side of the cheek, reddening it, and seemed momentarily to make him really angry. Ducking low, he bored in fast, his weight on his good left leg, and threw his clenched left fist full force at Barney’s belly.
“Hey!” I shouted, but too late, and besides it was already over.
Barney stood gasping for breath, astonished and speechless with pain and surprise. Dante was sucking the blood from his knuckles which he had bruised against Barney’s belt buckle. “Sorry, old bean,” he said, pummeling Barney lightly, carefully, on the back with his right hand. “Got carried away by the drama of it. Didn’t hurt you, did I?”
It took Barney a while to get his breath back. The rest of us stood around foolishly, making foolish talk, lighting cigarettes, making plans to go home. At last he said, “You play too hard. But I’ll survive.”
It was three days before I saw Barney again. We met in the bar of the old Murray Hill Hotel, soon to be torn down. I had been down on the Lower East Side, hunting for an old lady in a tenement off Avenue C. When I got to the building, I was sure they’d made a mistake in the office. The whole block was being demolished, and everything had been leveled on either side of the tenement, right down to some rubble on the ground so that as you approached the building you could see the scars of the walls that were no longer there. It reminded me of a bombed-out London block.
Almost all the flats inside were empty, padlocked or boarded up. In fact there was a condemned sign in the front hall. The hallway toilets, one to a floor, reeked of lye and urine. Two or three of the tenants still remained, probably because the city hadn’t yet found rooms for them. One of them turned out to be my quarry, a squat, somber, dignified old woman in carpet slippers and an immaculate housedress, on the third floor rear. She was quite alone.
There had been a son and daughter, but she had survived them both. Now she was on welfare, holed up in an old kitchen, seated at the table in the gloom with the teakettle bubbling away on the chipped old stove. I felt as though I were in a place that was going to last forever. I had some difficulty with the interview, since she knew little English, and I could hardly understand her Yiddish. But it didn’t seem to make much difference, we took our time, she shuffled back and forth across the kitchen, getting her glasses, steeping the tea, showing me her second papers.
It was strange how, despite the closeness of the atmosphere in the antiquated, overheated flat, and the homeliness of the old lady, I had been reluctant to leave. I was mulling this over as I arrived at the Murray Hill bar, which was a dark splendid old place, with much mahogany paneling and elderly, well-nourished gentlemen chatting in quiet well-modulated voices. It made me feel substantial and of some importance to drink there; I can’t say the same for those Manhattan bars which feature (Nitely) a young lady playing an electric organ and cater to amorous couples indulging in public foreplay.
Barney looked abstracted. I wondered, as I joined him and gave my order, whether he was still brooding over Dante Brunini.
“Say,” I said, “wasn’t that whole business with Dante crazy the other night? And that bit about his having a wife and kid …”
Barney hardly seemed to have heard me. “You want to know something? I’ve been locked out of my job.”
“Locked out?” I stared at him. “What does that mean?”
“I went in yesterday and found my desk locked. I thought it was a practical joke. The office manager said he didn’t know a thing about it, so I went in to see McKenna, the project leader. You know, my boss.”
My stomach felt queer. “Go on, go ahead.”
“Mac was sorry and all that, but word had come through. No more access to classified material. Everything we work on is classified, for God’s sake.”
“Does that mean you’re fired?”
“When I asked that question Mac began to sweat. He babbled about my valuable services to the lab. He said they have no intention of severing me. Sounds like decapitation, severing.”
“Still, as long as they don’t decapitate.”
“But they have. I’m off the payroll until I clear it up. What it comes down to is, they got the word to dump me. They just don’t want me to blame them for it.”
“But why? Who gave them the word?”
“They don’t say. Maybe the navy. I’ve got a date tomorrow with some commander down on Church Street.”
“Maybe he’ll clear it up.”
Barney laughed briefly. “You were the one that used to say I was naïve. Even if I insist it’s all a mistake, did you ever catch an officer and a gentleman admitting a mistake?”
“But if you can prove it—”
“What in hell is there to prove? Or disprove? That I’ve been sleeping with Deelie? That ought to give me ten merit points—her old man belongs to Hasty Pudding and Racquet and Squash and was a charter member of America First.” Barney started to bite his nails.
“Here, eat peanuts instead.” I pushed the bowl at him. “Maybe it’s your cousins in Russia, the engineers.”
“But I don’t know them from the Smith Brothers. Even poor Mama, who’s been writing all these years to Odessa, never gets an answer nowadays.”
“What was okay all these years isn’t okay any more. In case you hadn’t heard, our glorious ally…” A thought struck me. I grasped him by the arm. “Wait. Maybe it’s me.”
Barney did not look surpris
ed. He didn’t look at me, either. He pushed a half-peanut jaggedly across the bar. With his head down he replied, “I thought of that too.”
“In that case it’s simple.”
“Sure, I’ll tell the commander that I never heard of you. Or that when you asked me to pass out leaflets in college, I thought they were ads for a beauty parlor.”
“I’ll go with you. I’ll tell them I could never get you interested in politics. Which is the truth. And that—”
“No good. You can’t go around confessing to something you haven’t been accused of. My dear fellow, they’ll say, we didn’t have you in mind at all. Then what?”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“What’s more, you’d only get yourself in hot water. You’re working for the government, remember? It isn’t much of a job, but why lose it? Besides, it wouldn’t look good on your record.”
“They wouldn’t—” I started to say, Fire me, and then I thought, why wouldn’t they? Of course they would. And chasms opened before me.
This was just before the great inquisitions. We had had no experience with anything like it; we had nothing to go by, not even the knowledge that there were others in the same trouble.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“See if the navy will tell me what they’ve got against me. If I can square it I’ll dig up another job before they draft me. I’ll never go back to McKenna and those bastards again, that’s for sure.”
I started casting around in my mind for something with which to distract Barney. It occurred to me that he might be entertained by the odd hour I had just spent with the old lady down on the Lower East Side, so I told him about it.
He listened politely, no more, and I was about to wind it up and try something else when he lifted his hand.
“Wait. What did you say her name was?”
“Marya something or other.”
“We used to have a Cousin Marya in our family. You don’t suppose … Was there a daughter named Thelma?”
“There was a daughter, but I don’t know the name. Anyway she’s dead.”
“I bet she’s my mother’s cousin.” Barney gazed at me speculatively. “What a funny world. I would have thought she was dead and gone long ago.”
“Who was dead and gone?”
It was Deelie. She and Pauline had slipped up behind us without our becoming aware of them. I had to recapitulate the whole story for them.
“How quaint!” Deelie cried. “Imagine it, the poor old soul!”
She drew from me all the details of my interview with Cousin Marya, the lonely survivor of a condemned building: the empty flats, the strangely echoing stairs, the half-deaf old lady, half-crippled by lumbago and sciatica, insisting on serving me a glass of tea and rye bread with povidl while I confused her with my questions.
“Rye bread with what?”
“It’s a kind of plum jam.”
“Oh Barney,” she pleaded, “let’s go see her.”
“Nuts to that. I don’t even know that she’s the same one. And even if she was, then what? I wouldn’t know her, she wouldn’t know me.”
“But—”
“Anyway, if she was related to my family, somebody would have gotten in touch, wouldn’t they? Let’s forget it.”
So it ended. But it was strange, how I continued to worry about Cousin Marya as though she were some connection of mine rather than a possible one of Barney’s. I would have felt a little uneasy about her being shown off to Deelie, like something in a cage, and yet I was bothered that he hadn’t taken the trouble to make sure. It wasn’t that Barney was insensitive, but he was inclined to be thoughtless. At last, about a week later, I jammed my briefcase under my arm and went to see the old woman.
Things had not been good during that week. Barney was of course quite right about the navy. The commander referred him to naval intelligence, which assured him blandly that it had never so much as heard of him, and suggested army intelligence. It took the better part of the week for him to find someone to talk to there, and the results were hardly different. They were kind enough to suggest that he check with the FBI. Barney discovered that it was easier to have the FBI investigate you than to investigate them. When they learned that he had come not to answer questions, but to ask them, their hospitality evaporated. Two appointments had been fruitless, and though he had still to see the area director, Barney’s sardonic smile was already growing strained and his manner stiff. It was almost as though he had indeed been persuaded that there was something wrong with him that he hadn’t been aware of before.
Meanwhile, at my office, Herman Appleman had quit to go into business. His G.I. loan had come through. And my other working buddy, Dante Brunini, greeted me more formally each time we met, as though I was the one he had punched in the belly. It bothered me a bit, and I discussed it with Pauline. She thought he might be upset at the business about his wife and baby, but I couldn’t see that. What difference did it make to me?
I was still thinking of these matters when I headed for the East Side to see Barney’s Cousin Marya. Maybe they even impelled me to go where I had no excuse to be and where I hadn’t been invited. But I needn’t have worried on that score, at least. When the old lady shot the bolt and peered through the partly opened door on the chain, her suspicious frown faded and she fumbled the chain free.
“Come in,” she greeted me. “Come, come. Nobody ever comes any more except the welfare lady.”
She shuffled back into the kitchen in her carpet slippers, the heels folded flat under heavy feet and her cotton lisle stockings wrinkling about her swollen ankles. I made as if to wipe my feet at the door, but there was no need. The linoleum—its pattern worn through at the stove and around the porcelain table—was all but covered with spread-out pages of the Jewish Morning Journal.
“Sit by the table, you can ask the questions.”
I sat opposite her and looked into her heavy-featured face, the cheeks and brow scored with a network of lines as fine as cobwebs. She had a massive, mannish nose with a wart on one wing, a set of imperfectly fitted teeth, and kind, kind eyes which redeemed everything. They forgave me for intruding, they invited me to tell everything, they promised to try hard to understand.
I cleared my throat. “I didn’t come for questions. Not for three weeks yet. They’re not due for three weeks yet, you understand?”
“So you came anyway. Why not?”
“I came …” I hesitated. “Do you know a Barney Meltzer? Your cousin’s son?”
“My cousin Sadie’s a boy? You know him? Bernie Miltz?”
“If it’s the same one.”
“Why it shouldn’t be? You know how long it is I didn’t see him? I got the announcement from his Bar Mitzvah maybe ten years ago. But I don’t remember, tsu did I send a present, tsu didn’t I.” She smiled shyly. “He came to the door when he graduated high school, I didn’t recanize him. A giant. A beauty, like a policeman, big, handsome. What’s a matter, Bernie, I said, you didn’t come by me sooner? Now I don’t know, will he come again.”
I was embarrassed. And confused too—we were probably talking about two different people. “Well, like all of us, he’s got trouble. Tsurros. With his job, you know, brain-work.”
She nodded knowingly. “So how’s by you, with the government?”
We chatted desultorily after that. I felt a vast sense of ease and relaxation with the old lady once we got away from such topics as Barney. My own tensions seemed to find release in her kitchen as nowhere else. Perhaps that was why, after I had left and gone about my business, I decided not to mention it to Pauline. My first meeting with Marya had aroused more curiosity in Deelie, it was true, than in Pauline, who was used to my encounters. But how could I explain to Pauline, particularly when I couldn’t even explain it properly to myself, this second visit, which had no excuse at all? So I didn’t mention to Pauline a meeting apparently trivial, but yet of a significance that I could not quite fathom.
For a while I persuaded
myself that I had stopped by first to find out whether Barney was indeed related to Marya, and thereafter because her flat was convenient for a breather and a glass of tea. Only gradually did I admit to myself that it made no real difference to me whether or not she was Barney’s relative, that I had no other calls within a radius of eight blocks of her blasted and devastated neighborhood, and that it was an effort to arrive at that lonely tottering tenement surrounded by rubble, and to climb the moldy and odorous three flights of decaying stairs to the serene sanctuary of her changeless apartment.
For a while I was afraid that I was imposing on her privacy, so I took to bringing along small presents: a net sack of oranges, a tin of Swee-Touch-Nee Tea, a bag of Bialystoker rolls, things that I thought she could use. And it was always with an indescribable sense of relief that I heard her shuffling to the door in response to the rap-rap-rap code signal of my knock: “Who’s dere? Is you?”
We became friends. As the fortunes of my other friends turned, and the face of the city closed and hardened for us, I looked forward more eagerly to my visits with Marya. Barney had had no luck with the FBI. In desperation, he was commuting to Washington, hoping to find somewhere in the blank impersonal corridors of the federal investigative agencies an answer to his dilemma before it would be too late. He stayed three days, he came back, he went out to Jersey to quiz McKenna again, he explained the unexplainable to his draft board, he went to Washington. There was little we could do to help. Deelie was concerned, but her mother in Greenwich had developed an acute liver ailment (probably cirrhosis, I thought unkindly, from too many martinis) which kept Deelie running back and forth too.
But when I went to see Marya, I didn’t talk to her about any of this, although it was preying on my mind. I think all I wanted was the assurance of her solidity and permanence in those rooms in which she had spent so many rooted years. As long as she was there I could not be soured on the city, with its grinding drive for money and place, or frightened by the rank growth of ambition among my friends, whom I had thought to be as happy and careless as Pauline and I, but who were learning a vocabulary—“in the know,” “lunch dates,” “capital gains”—that was new in our lives.
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 5