NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  He stepped warily out on deck, staggering a little under the weight of the dead battery, which he now had to give a decent burial. Moving slowly along the boat deck past the captain’s cabin, his eyes gradually strengthening in the pale glow of the masthead lights as the rest of his body weakened, the battery which he carried on his shoulder (like a young father stealthily bearing the coffin of his dead infant to a moonlit cemetery) growing heavier with each step, he came abreast of the chart room at last under the watchful stars and paused to catch his breath.

  Then he noticed a figure standing on the bitts at the bow of the vessel. He was leaning over the side, apparently watching the phosphorescent fish fleeing in the white spume from the ship’s cutting edge. He was not the bow lookout; he was not, in fact, a crew member at all. Who else but myself, thought Philip, would stand nervously peering ahead, towards America, at four o’clock in the morning, on this swaying, laggard vessel? The man straightened, flung something to leeward with the sweeping motion of a baseball pitcher, then bent over the gunwale once again. It was Bradley Holliday.

  Rage rose like blood in Philip’s throat. He hawked up a mouthful of Holliday’s gin and lemon juice—it tasted sweet and thick, like blood—and spat it over the side. Holliday was probably so exultant over his betrayal of Phyllis that he could not go directly to sleep; now he looked forward, no doubt, to leaping up and down on the catwalk once again with a length of rope, exposing his rotting body to the sun and the sea and Philip’s loathing gaze.

  Philip lowered himself carefully and silently down from the boat deck on the iron-runged ladder. As he approached Holliday from the rear, stepping quietly in his sneakers, he saw the engineer pick up a bottle and stuff it with paper. Holliday was so intent upon his task, twisting sheets of paper and cramming them into the narrow neck of the bottle, that he would have been unaware of anyone’s approach even if it had been less stealthy.

  When Philip was only a few feet behind his quarry, he stopped and hefted the battery, high in the air. Held over his head in this way, like an offering, it seemed to have grown lighter; and yet, he reflected, how easily it could crush a man’s skull! Standing this close, he could see the exact spot where it should land: a little bald area at the crown of Holliday’s head, circled like a target by thin wet strands of hair. The blow would send Holliday and his letters to the bottom of the ocean. While Philip stood behind him and a little below him, gathering his moral strength to a focus, Holliday raised the gin bottle which he had stuffed with Phyllis’s letters and flung it into the sea. At another time the gesture would have been outrageously melodramatic, but now, in the pearly gray morning just before dawn, alone at the wet clear bow of the tanker, it bore a stern logic of its own, terrible and final. Yet when Holliday proceeded to tear the girl’s picture into long thin fluttering strips that took to the air almost of their own accord, like the colored rag-tails of a kite, Phil was moved to protest this abandoned act. He took a step forward.

  Holliday whirled about and revealed his true face to Philip. Everything of the rake, the lady-killer, the poseur, was eaten away. His feet slid from the bitts to the deck. His eyes, spray-flecked and mad in the growing light, glared desolately at the dead battery that was suspended over his head, then moved across Philip’s face until they encountered their mirror in Philip’s eyes.

  As they stood at the bow of the ship that swayed slowly towards their homeland, face to face in this final moment of recognition, they stared silently into each other’s eyes, and the sun came slowly and silently crashing over the horizon of the southern sea.

  YEAR OF GRACE

  Burton rettler had no intention of falling in love when he entered Vic’s Pharmacy. There had been no warning of it while he downed his tuna sandwich, glancing occasionally from his horn-rimmed reflection in the steamy mirror beyond the Silexes and the tall aluminum urns to the slim girl making change at the window; but the moment he put his money into Victoria’s cool hand and looked into her laughing eyes he knew that he was in trouble.

  He asked why he had never seen her before—her voice was pitched somewhat lower than he would have expected; he asked for a magazine that he didn’t want from a rack to the right of the cash register—her figure was so good that it made him nervous to watch her bending over; he asked for a date—her alacrity in accepting, and the gentle way she accepted, proved that she appreciated him for what she saw him to be, an intellectual and a man of honor. Four months later they were married.

  Burton and Victoria were a levelheaded young couple. Both sets of parents—Victor Merz the college-town druggist and his lame wife, and Joe Rettler the windshield-wiper salesman and his rose-fancying wife—were pleased that their children had their feet on the ground. The marriage was a good bet from all points of view: Mr. and Mrs. Merz were delighted that Burton was both substantial and ambitious and that he would not be taking away their only child for at least another two years, or until he had finished his Ph.D. The Rettlers, especially after an initial period of uneasiness verging on bewilderment that their boy had decided to become a college professor, were agreed that the responsibilities of marriage would spur him on to a more realistic grappling with the demands of academic success; Burt himself, walking home alone late at night during those four months of premarital discovery, found his fear of being played the fool yielding to the delicious certainty that he was a very shrewd and lucky fellow. As for Victoria, she was simply in love with a cultivated man, as she had always known she would be.

  Burt had been in Korea, and he was completing his studies in the language and culture of medieval Provence through the courtesy of the Federal Government. Victoria had just graduated in Psychology (The Abnormal Child), but was more than happy to go on clerking for her dad in order that her new husband might be free to complete his dissertation unhindered. Day by day they found that their tastes and aspirations dovetailed. Night by night they found that it was fun to be together, and to be married. Thanks to Victoria’s realtor uncle, they rented a two-room apartment, which they furnished cautiously, little by little; they bought practical kitchen gadgets from the ads in the Sunday Times sports section; and for special occasions they gave each other long-playing records. By their first anniversary Burt was well into his dissertation, they had a Waring blender and two hundred and thirty-seven dollars in the bank, and Victoria was itching to have a baby.

  This was a little alarming to Burton, who was becoming more and more concerned with his career as its outlines became progressively clearer to him. He could not exactly say to Victoria that motherhood would mean the loss of her job income, which in turn would mean delaying his degree for six months while he made up the difference and lost out on a possible appointment. Nor could he say that she would be a somewhat less gracious hostess to the head of his department and to the professor under whom he was writing his dissertation if she were constrained by a distended stomach or by an infant crying behind a screen in the corner of the living room. Nevertheless, he got the point across to Victoria, who was already dedicated to his advancement with a devotion that anticipated him in nearly every area, from typing and alphabetizing his bibliography to getting up cozy cocktail parties and intimate dinners for strategically placed faculty members; and she was willing to put off what she wanted until Burton had gotten what they both wanted.

  Virtue and hard work were rewarded. Burton got his Ph.D., and what was more, an instructorship; Victoria was perhaps even happier than he, since she had been secretly apprehensive of leaving the town in which she had been born and lived all her life for another college town perhaps thousands of miles from her family. She had never said anything about it, but then as the months went by Burton too seemed to be acquiring the skill of reading her mind.

  “You were really scared, weren’t you,” he said pleasantly one autumn evening, “at the idea of having to leave Mom and Pop Merz if I’d gotten an instructorship some place else.”

  “I’ve never traveled much, you know,” she replied, suddenly shy. “I ne
ver lived away from home. You’ve been to Korea, and all.”

  “My home girl.”

  “Don’t tease me.”

  “All right,” he said seriously. “I’m applying for a Fulbright. I wouldn’t do it if my chances didn’t look good. A year in Provence, you wouldn’t be afraid of that, would you, Vic?”

  She had smiled. Of course, it seemed silly when you looked at it that way—to be afraid in this day and age to leave Mommy, afraid to cross the ocean, afraid to do what thousands were doing and millions were dying to do. There were two things that she might have said in reply: first, that it was hard to believe that she, Victoria Rettler, had earned a lady’s life in Europe; and second, that the word for what she felt when she was actually faced with change was not fear but uneasiness. All it meant, she was reasonably sure, was that because of the way she had been brought up she greeted the prospect of any alteration not eagerly but with anxiety (or was that basically the way women were, the unadventurous sex?); but that didn’t mean that she was slack about going out and doing things when it became necessary—more efficiently, in fact, than someone like Burton himself. This wasn’t something she could put into words, any more than Burton could say bluntly just why he wasn’t ready to become a father, but this was what husbands and wives should be able, she thought, to understand about each other.

  The opportunity to demonstrate her adaptability came very soon. Burton walked swiftly into the drugstore one morning, hatless and with his cheeks reddened by the winter wind, looking younger even than that first day when he had awkwardly requested a date. “It came,” he said loudly, in a voice that almost cracked. “It came through, the Fulbright.”

  Victoria ran out from behind the counter. “I’m so proud! I’m so glad!” She hugged him hard. “Don’t meet your class tonight, Burton. Let’s go out and celebrate.”

  Burton’s self-possession returned quickly. “We don’t have to make a big thing out of it. But it is a feather in my cap, isn’t it? What’s more, it’s a bargaining lever. When we get back I’ll be able to start thinking in terms of promotion, and if necessary I’ll be able to shop around.” He added ebulliently, “Why, with that year’s research under my belt—”

  It was Victoria’s turn to step back. She looked at her husband in puzzlement. “Aren’t you excited about going there? About the trip and what you’ll do and what the life will be like? You sound as though you’re only calculating what the fellowship will buy after you get back.”

  Hurt and uncomfortable, Burton replied, “I was just trying to plan for us, that’s all. In every family, someone has to do the….” He caught himself up. “What the hell, this is no way to start our luckiest day. I’ll take you down to Bauer’s for beer and knockwurst after my class tonight. You know, I’ll bet you lit into me just now because you’re all tensed up about going to Europe. Aren’t you?”

  It was fun, getting ready—until they had to apply for their passports. “We’d better get separate passports.” Burton said. “Costs ten bucks extra, but it’s worth it. You never know—”

  “But I’m not going to go wandering around Europe alone.”

  Burton looked at her in some bewilderment. “I’m just being practical. Suppose I have to go to Switzerland for a couple days, or—” He saw by the set of her jaw that he was getting nowhere. “What’s the matter, my home girl,” he said lightly. “Afraid I’m going to run away from you? It’s no fun traveling without you. Honestly, I’d never…”

  “All right, Burton.”

  So he applied for his passport, and she for hers, but somehow Victoria never seemed able to get downtown with her witnesses to complete the formalities. The time was growing short, and Burton held his temper, but finally he said rather brusquely, “Vicky, you can’t travel very far without a passport.”

  “Beverly was supposed to meet me at the Federal Building, but she had a toothache.”

  “Last time it was supposed to be Aunt Helen, and she—”

  “I’ll get the damned thing, don’t worry.”

  “It seems obvious that subconsciously you don’t want to go. You’re afraid, you don’t want to leave Mom and Pop—”

  “Stop psychoanalyzing me!” Victoria burst into tears.

  She got the passport in time, just in time, hating herself for having cried about it. After that, everything was easy.

  None of it had time to wear off, the initial shock, the unbelief, the buoyant spending of money for peculiar objects—passport cases, seasick pills, a travel iron—not when they kissed her mother and father goodbye at the station and boarded the train for New York, not even when they pushed their way through the crowds at the pier. But then at last everything was stowed away in their cabins (they were to sleep separately in Tourist Class, each with a bunk in a cabin for four) and they ran up on deck to bid farewell together to their native land. Seeing the enormous but fragile sky line through a blur of trembling hands and upflung scarves, seeing it fade like old lace in twilight almost before it could be believed, was like losing someone you knew you were on the point of falling in love with. Victoria felt herself crying like a fool; she unhooked her arm from her husband’s and fled.

  Burton found her, some moments later, lying on her bunk with a handkerchief pressed to her eyelids. He regarded her uneasily for a moment, then filled a glass with cold water from the carafe, squeezed down next to her, and offered her the glass.

  She sat up soon, shook her hair, blew her nose, and drank the water which her husband was holding as if it were a bouquet. What made it more disconcerting was her sudden awareness that he was treating her like an invalid, or a neurotic. Not only didn’t he share her emotion, he couldn’t even understand it; behind his uncomfortable grin was an uncomfortable suspicion that he might as well steel himself to play nurse to her seasickness. I’ll be damned, she said to herself, as she arose impatiently and took a brush to her hair; nobody’s going to take care of me. She smiled courteously into the mirror at the smooth reflection of her husband, who stood behind her with his hands loosely at her waist, the Dramamine pills doubtless tucked away in his vest pocket, the worry of having to care for her instead of being taken care of by her reflected ever so faintly in a slight knitting of his brows.

  “I’m fine now,” she said. “Now that we’re really on our way…. Let’s go eat, I hear the bells. I signed up for first serving—you’re always hungry so early, and they say that the sea air….”

  The voyage was a vacation. No, it was more than that. On their earlier vacations together, starting with their honeymoon at Lake Superior, Burton and Victoria had been engrossed in each other, and in their common dreams. Now they could—or at least Victoria could—become engrossed in other people. There were, it was true, many young couples more or less like themselves (they were the ones with whom Burton seemed to prefer to spend his time), but there were also people unlike any they had ever encountered before. Victoria found herself drinking at the little bar with a Fresno rug merchant bound for Amman and Damascus, playing shuffleboard with a scintillating blonde of uncertain age and occupation who was heading for a vacation (from what?) at Positano, defending the younger generation to elderly Italian peasant women who lay groaning in their deck chairs.

  To Burton these people were amusing, although raffish and unprofitable. But he hesitated to complain to Victoria about her new acquaintances, if only because they apparently kept her in high spirits. He turned instead to those with whom he instinctively felt at home, and to preparations for his pending research, while Vic amused herself with the oddballs.

  They disembarked, Tampax, foot warmers and reference books, at Cannes. The rug peddler, the blonde and all the elderly Italians stood at the rail smiling sadly and waving down at them as they bobbed off in the lighter toward Palm Beach and the white Greek yachts with their bowers of carnations and tanned ladies in shorts who sipped long smoky drinks and watched carelessly through binoculars as the launch bore them ashore.

  Victoria turned to her husband and slipped h
er fingers into his free hand.

  “Excited?” he asked. Several first-class passengers, smelling of brandy, French perfumes and fine cigars, turned and smiled at them.

  “Yes.” She added in a low voice, “But I’m scared now, too. That’s worse.”

  Burton freed his arm and clasped her closely about the waist; but then he proceeded to say lightly, “This isn’t an invasion barge, you know. Nobody’s going to be shooting at us—they may even be glad to sec our dollars.”

  As they were herded through customs and police and had their possessions loaded on a rickety old truck, Victoria’s high-school French failed her utterly. It was simply up to Burton to get them out of there, to pay off the men who’d handled their baggage and to tell the driver where to take them. The unexpected effort hardly seemed beyond him—he was extraordinarily matter of fact about what could have been the first challenge of their new life—but the issuing of orders, the tiresome attention to detail, and the haggling infuriated him. By the time they were settled in the Citroën taxi his lips were quite white.

  “Bastards,” he said. “Trying to clip me just because I talk with an accent.”

  “Maybe,” Victoria suggested somewhat timidly, “they overcharge everybody who lands here at Cannes. I mean, all the tourists must seem so rich, and look at those hotels. Maybe they just resent—”

  “Haven’t you heard about the French peasants? They bury their loot in the back yard.” He laughed. “Don’t worry about them—they can buy and sell us.”

  They were heading for a little village a bit inland from St. Tropez; a colleague of Burton’s had spent a week there the summer before and had returned ecstatic, with colored slides of the cobbled, sun-dappled streets and stories of charming little villas for rent. Poring over a Hallweg map, Burton had decided that this would indeed be a cheap and cheerful headquarters for the year’s Provençal research. It was not a hangout, although there was a congenial little foreign colony, and it was just too far from the sea to make it attractive to tourists. Carefully, Victoria had written ahead to their friend’s inn with the aid of a Cassell’s dictionary, requesting a reservation with full pension until they would be able to lease a suitable small villa.