NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  I could never explain to Pauline, who was hurt by my stubborn resistance to being bored every Friday night at her parents’, that I was the one who had found a relative in Cousin Marya. That she had been teaching me a game called sechs und sechsig, which we played with some matchstick pegs, a pad, and a greasy, rubbed, and creased pack of cards. That I enjoyed watching her ringless hands, of which she was very vain (with good reason, they were her best feature), patting the cards together and dealing them out deliberately, her heavy lips, shadowed with white hairs, moving silently, counting, as she dealt. That, although I was crudely, even vocally grateful for my mother-in-law’s weak heart, which prevented her from coming to Brooklyn to visit us, I even enjoyed sitting in silence with Marya over a glass of tea, watching her fingers drumming endlessly, patiently, on the stained tablecloth as she marked the measured passage of time in my company.

  One afternoon late in the winter I ventured to try to explain to Marya some of the things that were troubling me, not specifically—what could she understand of making contacts or getting in on the ground floor?—but in a general way, as one would tell one’s grandmother of a disappointment in love. She covered my hand with hers as she had never done before, so that I could feel the warmth flowing from her fingers—wrinkled somewhat at the tips from many years of immersion in soapy water, but meticulously trimmed and still shapely—to mine; and she murmured something in Yiddish that I didn’t quite understand, but that seemed to me to mean, “As long as I’m here, you’ve got where to spill out your heart.”

  After I had said goodbye to her, I found that I wanted to walk, so that I could think about myself and Pauline, Barney and Deelie (who, it appeared to me, was not cherishing Barney at this hard time of his life as she should have). Was it my imagination that she seemed to be moving away from him, retreating, as the fissure deepened at his feet? Was she not only bothered, but bored by his trouble? Was I being unfair, or smugly parading my own innocence, to feel that Deelie was simply out in front of us all, but was not traveling in a direction essentially different from that taken by our other friends?

  I walked for miles. Finally I emerged from the Lower Manhattan jungle at City Hall and mounted the steps to the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge. While I crossed in the dusty gloaming, only half aware of the city, the harbor, the Statue all winking on behind the delicate fretwork of Roebling’s dream, I made up my mind to tell Pauline all about my meetings these last weeks with Marya, and to ask her whether we ought to talk to Deelie about Barney.

  But how idle it is to attempt to arrange the future! Especially when what you plan for is shifting a burden from your own shoulders to someone else’s. Thinking that I would be the first one home, I stopped at the liquor store to buy a ninety-seven-cent bottle of chianti. We would have a quiet glass of wine while we relaxed and talked, and then we would go on out to dinner.

  When I opened our door there was a flickering light under the sill, and soft music playing. Surprised and uneasy, I paused at the threshold, the wrapped bottle dangling from my hand. The apartment had been cleaned, and candles glowed on top of the bookcase. There were six fresh-cut roses in the glass vase I had bought on Third Avenue. I smelled chicken cooking. Then as I stepped forward the door swung to behind me and Pauline was upon me, her arms around my neck and her lips on mine.

  I held her off and looked. She was as freshly made up as the apartment. She had tied back her hair and was wearing a new pair of slacks and an Italian embroidered blouse.

  “It’s not my birthday, is it?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I just thought it would be nice, for a change … We don’t want to get into a rut, do we?”

  “Never.” I hung up my coat and reached farther back into the clothes closet, where we kept our small stock of kitchen utensils, for the corkscrew. “But you must have gotten home very early.”

  “I took the afternoon off. Oh, I can’t hide it, I can’t keep anything back! I was going to wait until we ate, and then break it to you slowly. I’m going to have a baby. We’re going to have a baby.”

  I stared at her dumbly. She looked the same as always. Fresher, yes, excited, but not changed. But I must have looked different, because Pauline’s eyes filled with tears.

  “You’re not angry, are you?”

  Then I found my voice. “My darling, I was just so surprised. Now that it’s real—it is real, isn’t it?”

  We fell together onto the rickety studio couch that Pauline had tried so bravely to smarten up with a piece of fabric. Pauline made herself small in my arms. “I went to see the doctor after lunch. Then I didn’t go back to work. Don’t you think we ought to celebrate a little? It’s only five or six months earlier than we’d planned on.”

  “Yes, that’s so.” It was so. When you look back on it—or when you’re the woman in the case—it’s such a small thing, six months. But the moment of impact, when you’re totally unready, is as thudding and heart-stopping as the moment when the doctor comes toward you from the operating room. The saliva dries in your mouth as you struggle to understand that nothing will ever be the same.

  As our reveries spun out, they overshadowed my earlier need to reveal my meetings with Marya and what I in my turn had been trying to come to terms with during the afternoon. How could I inflict that on Pauline now? I would have to make up my own mind, alone, what to do about Barney—although during the course of the evening, as we drank and whispered and gnawed on little pieces of chicken, I came to feel that just possibly there was very little I could do, any more than I could have held Pauline back from motherhood when some inner certainty urged her that the time was ripe. Maybe, I thought, maturity lay in the discovery of my own limitations.

  Late in the evening, before we moved to the bed in our stockinged feet, arms twined each around the other’s waist, I took it upon myself to say what Pauline was too considerate of my confused feelings to utter aloud.

  “This is no place for a baby. No kitchen. No room to mix a formula, change a diaper, rinse bottles—except the bathroom sink.”

  “I guess that’s so.” Pauline knew that it was. She knew too how much harder it was for me than for her, at that moment, to turn from the past toward an incalculable future. So with infinite tenderness she added, “But let’s not be cold about this place. I’ve been happy here, alone with you. Have you been? You have, haven’t you?”

  I nodded, my face against her throat. Once again I found it impossible to speak, perhaps because now I was close to tears, perhaps because she was mothering me just when I should have been reassuring her. We had eaten and turned off the lights, and by the uncertain flicker of the one candle that still guttered on our teetering bookcase, and the yellow ray that splayed out around the cracked dial of our portable radio, we could just discern each other’s features, and our surroundings—the secondhand and second-rate objects with which we had hopefully furnished our two small rooms. Outside the window, the night breeze rattled the dead leaves on the lonely tree that rose defiantly for two stories from the shabby garden in the courtyard below.

  All evening the radio had been playing. Now, as we remained still, listening to the voice of the rising wind and the beating of our hearts, the WQXR announcer’s deadly familiar voice broke in on us: “Next we are to hear ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain,’ by Manuel de Falla.”

  Pauline reached out to turn it off. “We don’t need it. We’ve had our own nights in the gardens of Brooklyn, for a whole year.” She touched my lips with her fingers. “I’ll never forget this room. Or these nights. We had fun all over New York, but the heart of it was here. After all, it was on a night like this, with the window open and the birds fluttering in the garden, that we made our baby…”

  Next time we saw him, Barney had gotten another job, at a small place in the Bronx. For one thing, his money was running out. He had engaged a lawyer, and was still running down to Washington on his hopeless quest for derogatory information about himself. For another, he had to hold off his draft board, a
t least until they quit reaching for men in his age bracket, if not until the draft act expired. What could I say to him?

  Besides, I was retreating into my own troubles. Not, I prefer to think, out of selfishness, but because that was the trend of the times, of our age, of what the city slowly pressed us to do. I had to find a place for the three of us, with a real kitchen and bath, and I didn’t have forever in which to do it. In New York that year it was all but impossible; it was totally impossible on our money.

  So one thing brought another in its wake. And up in the Bronx, the Friedes, not yet aware that they were going to become grandparents (I had pleaded with Pauline for an extension while I coped with the problems of expectant fatherhood, knowing that her mother would be hurt beyond words if the secret was kept from her too long), were already sending out feelers, like lonely polar explorers tapping out radio messages. Their boy would be graduating from high school soon. They had high hopes for him. If only he could get a boost from his sister and brother-in-law … I hadn’t asked for the paper bags of jelly cookies made by Mrs. Friede’s loving hands, any more than I had asked for the bills that she wadded into her daughter’s purse during our Friday evening visits. Neither had I foreseen that I would be expected to change my life so that my brother-in-law could go to college.

  One night Barney came over to play the fiddle with me. We weren’t doing that as often as we used to. “We may not be doing it at all in the future. Who knows?” he demanded gloomily.

  I tightened my bow and rubbed resin. “If you want to look at it another way,” I said, “we’re lucky we’ve had this year. It’s been pure gravy. Now comes Real Life.”

  “Some life. If it wasn’t for Cordelia—well, you know what I mean. I got fired again today.”

  I put down my fiddle. “Again?”

  “Are you surprised? All the work is classified, no matter where I go. It may take a day, it may take three weeks, but as soon as the word comes through, out I go. With regrets.”

  “Barney, go back to school. You ought to be teaching. The longer you put off your Ph.D. the harder it’ll be.”

  “You bore me, man. Don’t make me bore you. My draft board won’t let me, it’s the middle of the year anyway, I haven’t got the money to do it on my own, I can’t get a teaching fellowship with all these jobs shot out from under me … Come on,” he wound up irritably, “let’s play.”

  I felt there was more to it than that, but for the first time in our friendship there were things we couldn’t talk about. I hadn’t been able to tell Deelie (I never saw her alone) that Barney desperately needed help to break out of his trap. I couldn’t explain to Barney my conviction that we were moving, all of us, to a point of crisis. Did our lives have to be compressed into narrower confines, bounded by the twin measurements of ambition and fear?

  Daily my confidence shrank. On the streets the girls’ dresses grew longer as they scurried, like so many mindless mice, to let out their hems in accordance with the dictates of Dior. In the bars, the elevators, the Federal Building where I used to chew the fat with Dante Brunini (he never seemed to turn up any more when I was there), the men’s faces grew longer as they took the bit between their clenching teeth and bent their necks to the supposedly necessary burdens of metropolitan manhood.

  I rang doorbells in search of an apartment, the way I had as a newly fledged civilian. But now nobody was interested in what I was, or in my hopes and dreams. Nobody had any apartments either. That is, nobody except a ferret-faced couple who wanted two thousand dollars for the wicker porch furniture they had furtively imported in the dead of night.

  The decorating DeFees, however, had turned up both an apartment and key money to buy their way into it. When they had finished stripping walls down to the bare brick, rewiring, and installing new floors and false ceilings, they threw a big party to celebrate—and also to announce discreetly their going into joint business. It was perfectly plain to Pauline and me, when we arrived and pressed their shiny buzzer, that the DeFees were scrambling into a milieu far removed from the likes of us, in terms of both décor and guests.

  We were barely out of our coats when Eleanor DeFee took us on an escorted tour. All too obviously she was bucking for a photo spread of their careful apartment in House Beautiful (“Two Careers, Two Lives, One Charming Home”). It was all gracious and elegant, from the black and gold inlaid tiles of the foyer to the Somali masks set into the living room walls in cunningly lit shadow boxes, and the imported terrazzo in cool seaweed around the lavabo. There was even a French coffee grinder on the kitchen cabinet beside the Italian espresso machine.

  As for the guests, they seemed to me to fall into two groups, mingling for two distinct purposes: our old friends, there to stare and to measure their own ambitions against the DeFees’ acquisitions; and a new crowd, invited because they could be of use to the DeFees and their pals in the future. I was separated from Pauline (public policy at these gatherings) and unloaded by Eleanor DeFee at the side of a dean’s wife, who was sitting straight up in an Eames chair, smiling fixedly at nothing. I lit her cigarette (her first, judging from the way she manipulated it) and we began to talk at each other, desperately, about the charming apartment and the imaginative décor. Just as things were petering out, we hit on the clever expedient of chatting about our spouses.

  I peered through the growing crowd of overdressed and overcautious people, all rotating slowly, delicately, through the film of smoke and talk, balancing cigarettes and glasses as though they glided on eggs, instead of taupe broadloom, or feared to disturb the invalid in the bedroom beyond. Finally I spotted Pauline at the modular bookcase, deep in discourse with my cousin Zack, of all people.

  “That’s her,” I said, in a sudden access of honest pride. “That’s my wife, the little one. The beauty.”

  “Aren’t you a lucky fellow! Now let’s see, where’s Fred—oh yes, right there at the fireplace. You see, the distinguished-looking man? I think it’s wonderful for him to get out with younger people. He finds them so stimulating.”

  The dean was being stimulated by none other than Peerless Willie, who was urging his own pipe tobacco mixture on the older man. He was also urging himself. Before my eyes he was changing from Peerless Willie to Bill, he was laughing less, he was using his fiancée at his side as further proof of his stability, he was adopting chin-stroking and agreeable politenesses. It might take him a dozen years, but he would make Chairman of the Department, of that I was sure.

  I was rescued from the dean’s wife (and she from me) by Barney, along with the cleanest-cut Negro I’d ever seen.

  “Thank God,” I said to him, after he’d drawn me aside. “What a drag.”

  “Old boy,” he demanded solicitously, “are you shy with new faces?”

  “It isn’t the new ones, it’s the careful ones, so anxious to say the right things about Sartre, Henry Wallace, Chaplin, Le Corbusier, Stravinsky.”

  The Negro laughed, but only to be polite, because he was one of the careful faces—scrubbed, handsome, polite, and so refined that he made me feel like a boor and a yokel. Barney introduced him as a pianist who was working as accompanist to a famous Negro singer. The singer was thinking of having her apartment redone by the DeFees; in consequence—or in anticipation—they were courting this fellow, who was so starched that his arm creaked every time he extended it with his monogrammed butane lighter. Fortunately he spotted bigger game and was shortly sniffing their spoor, not forgetting, however, to take courteous leave of us.

  “Why so sour?” Barney asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong. Everything is so right that it’s deadly, from their copy of Verve at the careless angle on the coffee table to their bamboo and glass cups. That piano player goes with the cups—the whole crowd does.” I poked him with my elbow. “Let’s go talk to Pauline and Zack.”

  We hadn’t seen Zack in some time. He looked Barney up and down. “Well,” he asked, “where’s Deelie?”

  “She told me she’d be al
ong later.” Barney gnawed at his lip. “So she said, anyway… How’s the book going, Zack?”

  I don’t know whether Barney had simply wanted to change the subject or to embarrass Zack. In any case, Zack’s answer stunned me.

  “I’m packing it in for now, kid. Going home, day after tomorrow, to Syracuse, before the money runs out. My sister’s husband has offered me a hell of a good job in his ad agency, too good to turn down. I’ll get back to the book after I’m in the swing of the job.”

  I stared at my cousin. He looked me in the eye without flinching, my only near relative, who had told his family to go blow so he could live in a crummy sailors’ rooming house in Chelsea and work undisturbed on his novel.

  “Well,” he said, “guess I’ll go circulate.”

  We all watched him move off through the crowd, glass gripped in his hand, confident but wary, much as he must have glided, the beady-eyed rifleman, through the New Guinea jungle.

  I said, “Another one bites the dust.”

  “Don’t hate everybody,” Pauline said to me quietly, “just because they’re dying to make out and you’re not.”

  “Pardon me,” said a pretty brunette in a tight black dress, who had been introduced to us earlier as some connection or employee of Milton Berle’s, “do you know that couple? The man looks so familiar…”

  I looked out at the foyer. There, just inside the door, arm in arm, stood Dante and Cordelia. They had been walking in the rain, their faces were damp and flushed, Dante’s coat collar was turned up dramatically, his curly black hair glittered with raindrops. He was smiling expectantly, showing his fine teeth and his complacent pride in having brought a belle to the party. He hid nothing, it was hardly necessary; but then neither did Deelie. Each had dashed greedily to grasp for something momentarily exciting—and useful.