At my side Barney uttered a grunt that ended in a moan as he broke away from us and made for the bedroom. Before I could think of what to do or say, or even fully understand, Barney was in the foyer and plunging for the door with his coat over his arm, his face white, ignoring the couple who were making their way into the throng of ambitious decorators and editors and young academics on the make. The door slammed behind him and he was gone.
“I’m going after him.”
“No.” Pauline shook her head. “Leave him alone.”
“I can’t stay here any more. I don’t want any part of it.”
“We’ll go in a few minutes. But let’s not give anybody any satisfaction.”
We did it Pauline’s way. After a while we said our good nights and slipped away unnoticed. We said nothing to each other all the way home (except for neutral remarks on the subway platform: “Do you want a Times?” “No, thanks.”) until, at our very door, Pauline put her hand on mine.
“He’ll be back.”
“It won’t be any good. It’s all over.”
I lay all night thinking about Barney, and about those two who had betrayed him. And us, I wondered, what about us?
When I got to Manhattan the next morning, instead of going to work I took the Grand Street bus on over to the East Side. I hastened down the bleak street with the bitter wind whipping stained sheets of newsprint about my legs.
Marya’s building, that great rotting corpse, was more ghastly than ever in its loneliness now that foundations were actually being dug around it for the new projects. Gloved workmen were hauling away the debris of the toppled structure next door. I mounted the three flights to her flat, past walls which stank of wet and rotting plaster, on floors which had heaved from the wrecker’s ball swung against the groaning neighboring beams.
She was gone. I stared at the padlock on her door, shook it, pounded senselessly in a frozen rage on the panel. The building was quite empty. Where had they taken her? I sat down on the steps in the cold, the dirt, and the echoing quiet, and tried to think. No one knew I knew her. She didn’t even know my last name, or care. We were torn apart as effectively as though she had indeed died.
And if I could find her? What difference would it make, what good would it do for me to come upon her homeless in a Home, or bewildered in a project apartment with thermostat and engineered kitchen?
I got up and blew my nose and brushed myself off and walked out of the tenement without once looking back. In my mind it was already pulled down.
When I got home to Brooklyn I set to work at once on my census reports. When Pauline arrived I told her that I was up to date and prepared in good conscience to quit. And prepared too to leave the dingy inadequate apartment where we had spent all our nights, our nostrils filled with the nocturnal scents of real and dreamed-of gardens. And to leave the city, where I had found my love and been so happy—and where I could never be happy again.
When I first went to the suburbs in search of a place where we could rent a small house, raise a baby, and go into business, Barney gave me a skeptical farewell. “You’ll be back soon. One winter on the moors, and you’ll head back for civilization.”
He was wrong. But since he was New York born and bred, he had never quite understood how passionately I had needed New York, nor how abruptly that need had been quenched.
I got a G.I. loan—it was Herman Appleman who put the idea in my head—to start a music and record shop. I did well not because I am a brilliant businessman, but because LP’s came out, and I rode the wave of the culture boom. Who could go wrong? I had Pauline to help, too. Her brother came in with me after we saw him through college and he put in his time in Korea. With him in the shop, and a woman at home to watch the kids, Pauline and I are free of an evening to go to New York.
Every so often we get together with Barney and his wife. They own a very substantial house on Avenue J, with a two-car garage and a big lawn, for Brooklyn. We don’t find a lot to talk about. I had made the mistake of nagging at Barney, in those early months of his misery and loneliness, to get out of industry and back to graduate school. At last, after even the draft had finally blown over his head, he turned on me and cried angrily, “Would you ask a thirty-year-old arthritic to go into training for the Davis Cup matches? Why don’t you lay off?”
I think too that Barney was aggrieved at me for a while for having introduced Dante Brunini to our crowd. Certainly it was after he found out about Cordelia and Dante that he said to me, apparently apropos of nothing in particular, “It’s always bad to mix your business life and your social life.”
That shook me. “But that’s why we were happy in New York for a while. Everything was of a piece—work, play…”
“Life doesn’t work out that way.”
It hurt to hear him say that. But I knew then that we were going to have to go our separate ways. At least I had my music. Barney had neither his music nor his math.
Sometimes we still make a foursome of it and meet at the theater or at Town Hall, but Barney is not very good company. He is not just balding, he is embittered. His wife seems pleasant enough, so are their children, and he has done well—even better than I—as an executive in a toilet supply service owned by a wealthy brother-in-law. Always the brothers-in-law! But he is disappointed in himself in a way that makes me want to turn away and go.
I don’t think it was just Deelie. Surely Barney would have gotten over her sooner or later, Dante or no, because she doesn’t seem to wear well. After Dante she married twice, unsuccessfully; first a producer and then a vague European man of the world. From time to time I heard of her, a little high at art show openings and quite striking at first nights; once I bumped into her at a lavish impersonal cocktail party given by a record company to greet the arrival of stereo—she barely knew me.
She never did become an actress—the last I heard she was promoting the talents of a welder of fifteen-foot-high towers of crankcases and pistons—but Dante Brunini stuck at it. He has had some luck on TV as Dan Bruno. He wears a built-up shoe and is better looking than ever, and I read an item in the Times recently about his signing for a supporting role in a Tennessee Williams play. I still don’t like him, and I can imagine what he has done to get ahead.
I suppose that is what bothered me most about New York, aside from the actual fate of all of us. Whom you had to sleep with, he nice to, eat lunch with, in order to stay in the race, struggling blindly for unknown ends. I could never he happy in a city where drink and food, and friendship itself (as impermanent as the buildings), became a part of the whole grinding success mechanism. Nor could I be happy in the place where I truly learned, as I had only begun to in the army, what sin and sellout meant. After I understood what compromises would be expected of me—demanded of me—I had to leave.
I know the streets still, I know the stops on the GG Local as few New Yorkers do, I know where the best chances are for finding parking space. I know where to buy button coverings and Pakistani food. But the magic and the mystery of the city are gone. Now it is just a place, no worse, for those who want to look at it that way, than the placid and self-satisfied town where I live. Yet it persists, an indelible part of my young manhood. And like everything else I endured in those passionate years, it will remain until the end of my days embedded in the very core of my being, an internal capital, aflame with romance and infected with disillusion.
A GLANCE IN THE MIRROR
Waiting for the doors of the high school to open and his daughter to come running out, Roy Farrow was thinking about how stealthily spring had crept up on him. He had taken the usual precautions with the change of season—put his overcoat and tweeds in storage, brought the car in for tune up and overhaul—and he had even noticed, as he drove alone, not stopping for hitchhikers, across New York State, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, that he could keep the windows down and that beyond the curbs in town after town the forsythias were turning to gold and the daffodils were blowing open, yellow and wet with spring rain on t
he lawns of all the old houses that drifted back away from him as he sped on to the place where he had been born forty years before.
But now that he was here he really felt it in his heart, which was where you really should feel spring if you were to know it at all. Lazily slouched like this in the open convertible with the warm wind in his hair and the strengthening sun on his hands lax across the steering wheel, he was uncertain whether the quickening in his chest could be charged to the weather, to his return to his birthplace, or to the fact that in a moment he would be seeing his only child for the first time in twelve years. Indeed, it might have been the intoxicating fragrance of the early spring breeze bellying through the riverward windows of his Manhattan apartment that had first filled him with an unease verging on disgust when he turned to observe Minerva, half-drunk in broad daylight at the piano, and drove him to consider how he might repossess himself by screwing up his courage to return home at last and identify himself to his daughter.
A quarter of a century earlier, at this very time of year, he had been jogging along the cinder track that girdled the cathedral-spired school, desperately trying to earn his letter; and for an instant now he was shaken with a comical yearning to re-experience that boyish agony, even if he had to turn up the cuffs of his doeskin slacks and trot his heart out just once more on the hot, half-forgotten cinders; but in five minutes the doors would open, and beyond all this spring craziness was a painful desire to watch his daughter unobserved for a moment or two before he should walk up to her and take her by the hand.
He knew that he would recognize Kate at once from the snapshots that her mother sent him in response to the requests that sometimes accompanied his checks. Even without the pictures in his wallet, he would know her from a thousand other girls of her age, because of his ineradicable memory of how she had looked and felt as a three-year-old when he had hugged her goodbye, or maybe simply because of the special affinity of fathers for daughters, even for the daughters they left behind and came home to only after it was too late.
But then he thought: Suppose she doesn’t recognize me? What would he do if she were to stare at him blankly when he called out her name, and then turn away, as her mother must have taught her to do when strange men offered her candy or automobile rides? Roy wrenched about convulsively on the leather seat. Now he would probably have to pay the price for not having behaved sensibly, written ahead to Lisa that he was coming and then waited prudently at her house for Kate to come home from school. As he twisted about he caught a glimpse of his angry and ashamed face in the rearview mirror.
He pulled down the mirror for a better look at himself in this final moment and stared coldly at the empty stranger’s face. Bland and unlined, it had an aura of perennial youth that had been commercially useful in his trade but now struck him as almost hideous for a man of forty; and besides he knew, as few others did, that when he put on his reading glasses the pastiness of his complexion was accentuated and the large pores of his nose became perfectly noticeable. Beyond his broad pale forehead his platinum hair lay flat against his scalp like a smooth shining cap, just as it had done fifteen years before—no one but Minerva and his barber knew just how sparse it was getting. In five or six years he would be quite bald; already he could hear the wheedling words that his manager would use when he persuaded him to wear a hairpiece.
As he poked the mirror back into place, the school doors banged open and the walk before him became alive. First were the boys, cavorting, sniggering, elbowing, tossing balls back and forth, shouting. Then came the girls, moving more sedately than he would have thought possible, ruminant and bovine, and all wearing what looked like outlandish castoff skirts of their mothers, voluminous and puffed out fore and aft, above the thick shapeless white wool socks folded double over their ankles. But there were so many of them!
Roy was suddenly panicked. Supposing he were to miss her? He would have to drive to Lisa’s and hang around, like a rent collector or a man come to fix the faucet, in that house he had been dreading to visit. He jumped out and made his way through the pack of yelling boys to the girls strolling with linked hands and schoolbooks cradled in their arms like babies. Where was she?
When he heard someone calling, “Father! Father!” in a high clear voice, he could not at first believe that it was meant for him. He was taken by the arm, then, and half turned around by a tall thin girl who came up to his eyes. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Kate!”
He felt himself flushing. He had to speak loudly to make himself heard. “I didn’t think you’d recognize me… Say, can’t we get out of here?”
But it was too late already. He and Kate were surrounded by a growing circle of boys and girls who shoved at each other with happy ferocity, poking pencils at him for his autograph and chanting his name as though it were an incantation; he had to strain his ears to hear Kate, who clung fiercely to his arm, her eyes burning with pride and devotion. “You’re so modest! Anybody would recognize you, even if you weren’t their father! And I’m so glad you’re here! I knew it, I always knew you’d come!”
Yes, she was glad—but was this what he had wanted? With their arms twined awkwardly around each other’s shoulders, they moved slowly away from the school and down to his sloping convertible, which looked out of place and affected here. More students had gathered admiringly around the car and were waiting to be introduced by Kate. For one self-hating moment he wondered whether this cheap and easy hero worship had been his real reason for coming unannounced to pick up his daughter. And even if he hadn’t, why else was Kate so delighted to see the father who hadn’t even bothered to visit her in a dozen years?
At the curb some of the noisy crowd fell back to make way for a tall stout man who came forward with his arm outstretched and a hearty smile on his florid face. “This is Mr. Klass,” Kate said. “He’s our vice principal.”
“Delighted to meet you at last, Mr. Farrow.” He squeezed Roy’s hand fiercely. He was as bulky and self-assured as a football coach. “It’s always a pleasure to greet an outstanding alumnus. May I ask if you expect to be in town long? We’d be honored to have you address our assembly next Wednesday morning.”
“That’s very kind of you. But I’m just here for a very short visit with my daughter. I’m sure you understand.”
The vice principal was swallowed up in the press of his students before he could reply. Roy opened the door for Kate and then slipped behind the wheel himself. “Why don’t we meet your gang someplace?” he asked.
She said a little timidly, “Would you mind going to the ice cream parlor? That’s where everybody hangs out.”
It was only four blocks away. Kate’s hair, as fine as her mother’s, was blowing against his face, and as he reached down to shift into high his hand brushed her thigh, thin and not yet fully developed; but he could not see her face without squinting out of the corner of his eye, and indeed he was beginning to wonder if he would be able to look at her directly at all during the afternoon.
But when they were settled in a booth at the soda parlor, Roy found himself seated near the wall across from his daughter, with only two of her friends to keep them company. He glanced at the record selector at his elbow; four of the fifteen records listed were his. Guiltily he turned back to the glowing face of his daughter, as one of the girls leaned across him to insert a nickel.
“You don’t have to pick one of mine just because I’m here, Sally,” he said to the girl.
“What do you mean?” she said gruffly. “Roy Farrow and the Music of Tomorrow? We hardly ever play anything else, except for singers. You’re our favorite.”
Kate added excitedly, “She’s not just saying that because you’re my father, either. Even our music appreciation teacher had to admit that your band plays wonderful arrangements and that people are starting to play string instruments again on account of you.”
“But you don’t play a string instrument, do you?”
“Didn’t Mother write you? I’m taking the cello from Mr.
Poggi. I know you don’t use cellos in your orchestra, but ever since I heard Gregor Piatigorsky play the Dvořák Cello Concerto I’ve been crazy about it.” She went on, somewhat defensively, “Some of the kids think it’s not graceful for a girl.”
“That’s silly.” He had to speak loudly, over his own music—it was “Atomic Cloud.” That it was unbalanced in the rhythm section he had suspected before this; but why hadn’t he realized that the whole idea of it was pretentious and phony? “When people say things like that, it’s generally because they’re envious.”
“They’ve got reason to be envious of me.”
For one horrible moment he was sure that his daughter was being sarcastic. But he looked into her sparkling eyes, smiling gratefully and frankly above her ice cream soda, and he was ashamed. So she was proud of him. Well, when you were fifteen it was easier to be proud of someone you didn’t know than of someone you knew.
But how could he get to know her here, any more than in his apartment on Seventy-sixth Street, or in the recording studio, or in any of the hotels where he worked? All that he could learn here, as he chatted pleasantly with her friends about his band, about what Down Beat had said, about what they liked to hear best, was her facial expression and her public manner. He liked her thinness, her wide eyes, her tension; and behind the school-girl flutter he could sense already a coolness, a self-possession that could only grow stronger as she matured. “It must be a little sleepy here after all the excitement you’ve been used to,” she said, smiling, and it seemed to him that if he had waited another year, or perhaps two, before seeing her, she would have been not merely smiling, but mocking.
Since it was impossible to get any closer to her, Roy resolved to be simply amiable. The afternoon passed pleasantly, and when he had paid the waitress for all of Kate’s crowd, she turned to him and said, “You were a peach.”
Startled, he turned sideways and stared at her. “Kate … What do you mean?”
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 7