NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  The sun and the sea did their marvelous recuperative work. Sitting on the boat deck with his desk chair tilted against a bulkhead, full in the sun, Phil gazed through his dark glasses at the dully shining endless water stretching monotonously through space to the horizon. After a few days, he could step from the dark sweaty loneliness of the radio shack directly into the tropical sun, feeling with a hard delight the burning heat of the deck plates on his thin sneakers; easing himself slowly into the chair, his bare flesh crying out against the white sun, he could really open Tour to the Hebrides and give himself over to it and to the sun, without having to stare fixedly, like an angry victim of tuberculosis, at the impersonal spectacle of nature surrounding him on all sides. And eventually, he could even begin to look about the ship itself and note the little changes that had taken place around him.

  There were, for example, several men aboard the tanker who had not been there on the trip out from Panama. Two of these passengers who had boarded the ship in Brisbane ate in the saloon, although Phil did not see them there very often, since he usually got there almost at the end of the serving period, ate quickly, and left without stopping for a cigarette. One of them, who was obviously not a seafaring man, was a genuine puzzle: what was this fat middle-aged man, self-consciously dressed in creased khakis, doing on a slow-moving tanker that rarely carried passengers? But when he finally accosted Phil one morning by the Number Two lifeboat, he turned out to be such an uninteresting fat man that Phil could not even bring himself to find out what he was doing aboard ship.

  “You’re the radio operator, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How do you keep from going nuts? Always the same, day in and day out, week in and week out. You can’t even see a movie. No variety, not a bit of variety.”

  “I like it.” It was of course impossible to explain to the passenger that he had named precisely the things about sailing on the flat Pacific that Phil liked best. He picked up his book and began to read rudely, dismissing the man with the lowering of his eyelids.

  The other passenger was something else. The first time that Phil really saw him he was jumping up and down on the catwalk. Phil felt the vibrations, perhaps; at any rate, he looked up, blinking away from Boswell, and saw a tall, excessively thin young man, wearing only (like himself) shorts and sneakers, skipping rope along the catwalk, his thin hairy arms flashing through the sunny air as he vaulted up and down, moving erratically astern along the steel walk like some great eccentric spider. Despite these unusual actions he looked as though he was somehow at home on a ship; but Phil took an immediate dislike to him. This leaping about with a piece of clothesline seemed an overly familiar action for one who was aboard on sufferance, so to speak, and was not integrally concerned with the movement of the vessel on which he jumped. The passenger’s skin was extraordinarily white, gleaming flatly like the belly of a leaping fish suddenly exposed to the sun; if he was a seafaring man, it was strange that here in the South Seas there should be no trace of sun on his long thin body.

  If there was anything mystical about this swift dislike, it was strengthened early that evening when Henson, the third mate, and the only man aboard ship whose company Phil enjoyed, said to him, “Come into my stable, Phil. Eight days out and you haven’t even shown your face yet.”

  “All right,” Phil said. “In a few minutes.”

  There were three men in Henson’s cabin when Phil walked in: Henson himself, Caputo, the steward, and the tall passenger who had been skipping rope along the catwalk during the afternoon. Although the door was open wide and the porthole glass was hooked back against the overhead, there was little air in the room. All three men were smoking, and each one held a bottle of Panamanian beer; and since Henson slouched in his armchair, Caputo lay across the bunk, and the stranger sat on the settee, the room appeared unpleasantly crowded. Phil began to regret the sociable impulse that had drawn him down here, especially when he observed that all of the men were dressed only in shorts and slippers. Their skin was slick with a fine film of tropic sweat, and the cabin seemed to be filled with their heavy naked legs.

  Henson handed Phil a bottle of beer and said, “I don’t think you’ve met Bradley Holliday, Phil. Holliday, this is our radio man, Phil Stolz.”

  They shook hands.

  “Holliday’s an engineer.” Henson’s round old face smiled blandly, his eyes roving, joke-making, behind old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses. “But we let him up forward because he’s got some new records. We’re a very democratic ship.”

  Phil seated himself next to Holliday, who smiled pleasantly at him and offered a cigarette. “Smoke, Sparks?”

  “Thanks.”

  Holliday was losing his hair. His face was long, smiling, and polite; the balding skull gave his head just the needed touch of elegance, like a boutonniere. For without the gently receding hairline that made him look properly twenty-eight or thirty, there would have been something vulgar, something falsely genteel and cultivated, in his young American college man’s expression. He gets away with it, Phil thought, looking down at the Rachmaninoff album that Holliday held across his bony knees.

  He in his turn glanced down at the bright yellow dust jacket of Phil’s book and murmured, “I see you’re a lover of fine books.”

  “I like to read.” Philip hated the man, he was sure of it now, but he could not get up and leave, if only because Henson would be embarrassed.

  “I don’t care much for travel books,” Holliday said. “I prefer poetry, like Carl Sandburg.” He smiled around the cabin. “I’m a West Coast sailor myself, but Sandburg made me feel just what Chicago is like.”

  One poem, Phil said to himself, one poem in a stray anthology has made him an intellectual. The man’s very name was an affront; Bradley Holliday indeed… it sounded like the hero in one of the American Boy stories that Phil had read every month in an agony of excitement and envy when he was thirteen: Brad Holliday, madcap leader of Dormitory B, Brad Holliday, ace goalie of Percival Prep, Bradley Holliday, bronzed lifeguard at Bide-A-While Summer Camp …

  Watching Holliday as he slipped the first record out of the album with long graceful fingers and placed it on the hand-winding victrola, Phil realized, in one of those sudden painful bursts of insight that bring one face to face with the condition of one’s life, that if the man’s name only betrayed a Jewish or a European origin one would feel compelled by one’s sense of fairness not to condemn him without searching for the neurotic roots of his slippery and false manner; but a Bradley Holliday had to be held accountable for every overt expression of his essential vulgarity. Philip felt his spirit withdrawing from the room, leaving only his gross body seated next to Holliday, as the passenger tested the needle with his forefinger and said, “I hope you men enjoy this. I prefer Victor Herbert myself, but my girl is very fond of Rachmaninoff, so I bought her this album in Calcutta. After all, if you only have a limited number of records, this will be a change.” He finished his beer and chuckled, “It’s a long voyage home, as Eugene O’Neill once said.”

  Phil sat quietly through the recording, which happened to be excellent; the beer was not cold but cool, the ship pulsated quietly beneath the scratching needle, and when a touch of a breeze slipped in through the open porthole he could smell Holliday’s pungent shaving lotion. At one point—Holliday was changing a record and saying something about the value of great music as a solace for lonely seamen—Henson’s round and wrinkled eyelid drooped slowly behind the steel-rimmed eyeglasses in an exaggerated wink. The gesture was almost enough to establish a community of dislike, and Phil relaxed a little on the settee.

  The final notes of the Rachmaninoff concerto were still floating heedlessly out to sea on the tropical evening air as Henson heaved himself out of his chair and pulled on a pair of khaki trousers. “Almost eight,” he said. “I’m due on the bridge. But stay,” he gestured hospitably, “stay right where you are. I never lock my valuables.”

  Philip arose. “I want to
get a few hours’ sleep before I go on watch.”

  Holliday glanced at him curiously. “Don’t you keep a day watch?”

  “I prefer to split the hours. I enjoy the quiet at night, and the reception is usually better.”

  “I wonder…” Holliday looked down uncertainly at the book that Phil held in his hand, apparently unable to formulate a transitional statement that would smoothly bridge the gap between his feelings and his expectations. “Do you think it would be all right…” Once again he hesitated, and at that instant, that moment of honest uncertainty, his real charm, natural and unforced, shone through his false exterior. It seemed to Philip that whereas all too many people were cloying and overconfidential when their guard was down, men like Holliday could only be more likeable in their moments of revelatory weakness. He smiled encouragingly, and Holliday destroyed everything by saying, “I don’t often get the chance to talk with a man who enjoys good reading. You’re college graduate, aren’t you?”

  How false he rang after his little moment of sincerity! Philip replied coldly, “I had two years at Tufts once.”

  “Would it be all right if I came up to the shack some time, just to shoot the breeze for a while?”

  “The old man doesn’t want visitors in the shack, especially during watchkeeping hours. The best time to stop in is during my night watch, when he’s asleep.” Why didn’t he lie? He could have insisted that no one ever entered the radio shack. Holliday’s very irresoluteness, his sudden uncertainty, had wrung from him this grudging invitation.

  Holliday was once again in command of the situation. “That’s very white of you, Sparks. I’ll drop up real soon, and we’ll have a good long talk. I’m sure we’ll find that we have a lot in common.”

  Thus dismissed, Phil retreated in some confusion, tripping over the mat in Henson’s doorway as he stepped out to the passageway.

  Shortly after Philip went on watch that evening the third mate stepped into the shack on his way down from the wheelhouse. “I’m going to examine the night lunch,” he said. “Can I bring you a sandwich?”

  Phil shook his head. “No. What’s the story on the passenger?”

  Henson smiled slowly. “Holliday? You don’t like him, do you?”

  “Not much. He’s a phony, Henson.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that strongly. There’s some good in the worst—”

  “He skips rope.”

  Henson laughed. “Christ, Phil, if you’re looking for gossip … He’s been passing himself off on the black gang as a First Assistant Engineer—he even hinted that he sailed Chief during the war. But I’ve seen his license, you know. The man’s only a Third Assistant.”

  “That’s typical.” Phil looked up angrily. “Isn’t it typical, Henson?”

  “You’re pretty hard on him. I think Holliday is a likeable fellow, with more on the ball than the average engineer. I’ve seen more of him than you have this past week, and I find him good company. If I had his trouble, I doubt if I’d be so even-tempered and cheerful.”

  “What’s his trouble?”

  “He’s got syphilis.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Henson waved his hand tiredly through the hot breathless air. As he reached up to remove his steel-rimmed glasses he blinked; without the glasses he looked old and worn. Philip felt ashamed, looking at him like this.

  “You know that fat passenger?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a company doctor going home on leave. He’s been treating Holliday, trying to keep things under control until we dump him at Pearl, or Pedro. That’s why we couldn’t sign Holliday on as a workaway back in Brisbane. He isn’t fit to stand a watch, so the company decided to give him a break and a free ride home. After all, he’s been riding their tankers for a good many years. And Phil…”

  “Yes?”

  “If the company can afford to be charitable, why can’t you? Sometimes you tend to judge people as though they were on trial. I’m not complaining about that,” he added hastily, warding off Philip’s protestations with his outspread hand. “That’s your privilege. But can’t you take into account the troubles that people have had when you pass judgment on them? Suppose that Holliday talked this way about you—wouldn’t you want him to make an effort to understand you before he shot off his mouth?”

  “I don’t—” Phil checked himself. Suddenly he saw Holliday as he had been that afternoon, his thin, sick body clothed only in khaki shorts, cavorting about on the catwalk, trying to build himself up, trying to soak up sunshine. “What about his girl? The one he brought the Rack-man-inoff records for?”

  “Are you being cruel?”

  Phil flushed. “No. I’m curious.”

  “And I’m a cynic.” Henson lifted his shoulder wearily. He moved slowly to the door. “For all I know, she gave him the chancre as a going-away present, before he left home …”

  Phil sat until four o’clock in the morning in his iron and concrete room, listening to the throbbing heartbeat of the ship, choked and muffled as though it were slowly strangling in the warm Pacific, and listening occasionally to the plaintive chirping of other ships far away, which sounded as though they had settled only momentarily, like some strange and frightened birds, on the bosom of the southern sea. Conscientiously he noted what they had to say in his log, but their weak cries were no different on this white and star-filled night from what they had been or would be on any other such night. The peace and terror of the world, a thousand miles from the nearest thrust of rock, were such that it was almost an impiety to listen to other voices when one floated godlike and alone.

  But What do you do with all your time? his wife had to ask him when they lay in bed. “Some men paint watercolors of the sea, Joseph Conrad even wrote great novels about it, but you don’t even seem to be able to keep up with your reading.” Keep up, indeed. How could one possibly explain that he floated alone, like this, in order that it should not be demanded of him that he keep up? If the noblest human achievements could not compete with the annihilating force of the marine sun and moon on one’s lowered eyelids, why should one even attempt to struggle against a surrender to the timeless bronze days and the white silent nights?

  He no longer maintained the pretense of holding a book before him on the desk while he sat half-listening to the little voices of the distant ships. It was in these hours that he knew his own life and its ugliness as no artist could possibly reveal it to him, simply by extending his palm (which had participated in the countless brutalities he had committed in common with all the rest of humanity) and feeling, along its coarse surface, the velvety breath of this pure and unpeopled night. Shortly before dawn he could rouse himself and type Off Watch on 500 KC, leaving the swivel chair and the radio which committed him to the reactionary necessity of facing in the direction from which he had come.

  He customarily slept out on deck, on an army cot which he had borrowed from the sick bay. Tonight he lowered himself quietly to the cot, slipped off his sneakers, loosened his shorts, and stretched himself out at full length beneath the white and blue brilliance of the stars. There, on the slowly rocking sliver of cooling metal, his eyes bathed in an effulgence so brilliant that he had finally to blot it from his vision, Phil felt the very essence of his being stirring itself slowly, uncoiling and rising to the very heights for which it had striven unsuccessfully for thirty years …

  The next day Holliday did not present himself on deck with his skipping rope, and Philip felt obscurely grateful, as though there had been some unspoken understanding between them in the final moments of their meeting in Henson’s cabin the night before, as though Holliday had agreed: if you won’t hate me any more, Sparks, I won’t exercise in public any more.

  They did not, in fact, meet at all during the day, and Phil went about his marvelously monotonous routine: breakfast with the captain and his sullen Swedish jokes about things that had probably not happened aboard a windjammer in 1911; shaving before the unrevealing mirror, the disc of the sun once
again driving heat before it like a searing knife through the portholes; inspection of the massive batteries oozing sulphuric acid; the specially cold water of the shower stall dripping continuously behind all the other noises on this deck; the colorless hot iron of the ship itself as he made his way aft once again to the saloon where the engineers and deck officers, their chins sweating, fattened themselves on hot food and loud lying memories of their nights in Noumea and Brisbane.

  This same, same routine, hour following hour like the endless plash-plash of blue water slapping the plates of the ship, was as soothing to Phil as a compress laid across his dry burning eyes. While he sat and baked, Boswell hanging laxly from his sweating hand, he could watch the first mate standing at the clothesline on deck below him, tying up his dripping white socks and shorts; he could watch the arc of the sky, curving like a concave plate-glass window to meet the pale shining body of the sea. The sun, suspended behind the arching sky as though it hung in a clear curved window, sparkled coolly as always on the wetly glistening sea; but against his bare wet brown flesh it felt as though it were being focused through a burning glass. He squirmed about in a slow agony of pleasure, observing his skin browning through the dark glasses while rancor oozed like sweat out of his pores. Yes, while he broiled in the equatorial blaze, shifting now and again to match the slow swing of the day, he grew certain that every mean deed—the rotten fornications, the small hatreds and puny envies, the inconsequential and fruitless marriages—all were being baked out of his interior being; if he were ever again to touch land, he would return to combat renewed and whole.