THE MAN IN THE TOOLHOUSE
Not any more but once upon a time, I used to travel to Buffalo with the kind of exhilaration that children have on the way to a long-awaited circus. It had nothing to do with Buffalo, since the orchestras with which I have been performed in dozens of similar places; but even though I will probably never go there again, the mere mention of Buffalo by a stranger on a street corner can set to rattling in my mind the whole chain of recollections of Rita Conway and Ralph Everett, so that I find myself once again reviewing each link in the chain that will bind me for the rest of my life not only to Rita, but to Ralph and to the Everett home, which exists now only in the imperfect memories of a handful of people like myself.
I think I fell in love with Rita the first time we met, one dark winter afternoon in a rehearsal room of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. She was seated at a harp, her head bent forward, listening intently to the octaves that she was rapidly plucking as she tuned the instrument, her face so hidden by her long blonde hair that when she looked up at the clicking of the heavy door which I closed behind me, I was stunned by her beauty, and I shifted my violin case from one hand to the other, stammering an apology. She laughed, and I introduced myself.
Rita made it very clear that she respected my musical ability, my metropolitan background, even my poverty. And I adored her hardy delicacy that always reminded me of a wildflower, and her small-town temperament mixing matter of factness with romanticism in a way that charmed me completely.
As I think back now, the years at Eastman seem to me like one of those intense dreams which end so abruptly that you can’t remember, try as you may, whether its essential quality was one of frustration or fulfillment. Rita and I played duets together, picknicked together, and worried together about our separate futures. She always knew that I loved her and she was shrewd enough to realize that, since the whole thing was impossible, it was her responsibility to keep everything pitched on a comradely plane so that the inevitable break would not be too painful.
But Rita flattered me by intimating that I was more adventurous than she, as well as more talented (which I knew anyway), and that it was I and not she who faced the exciting prospect of conquering poverty with my music; while she would eventually have to relegate her harp to its proper corner in the parlor, and find a suitable husband.
My impossible dreams ended brutally with an invitation to Rita’s wedding, which took place the September after our graduation. Fortunately I was touring that year with a dance band, and I was able to express both congratulations and regrets by mail.
I had met Ralph Everett just once, before I knew that Rita would accept him, and I remembered him only as an engineering student at the University of Rochester, with a shock of black hair. Rita’s explanation, made one June evening shortly before Commencement, had hurt me. “You see,” she said, “Ralph already has a job lined up in Buffalo, with the Water Department. So that we’ll be able to have an apartment, and everything … and really, even my parents are quite pleased.”
I would have preferred to hear that they were displeased; I suspected that her parents must always have feared that she would run off with someone like me. “And Ralph? Do you love him?”
“I’ve just never met anyone like him. He’s as solid as a rock, and yet he’s the most talented person I’ve ever known.”
“In engineering?”
“He writes. I have faith in him, Harry. I’m going to help him become a great writer.”
“Is that what he’s going to be?”
“Engineering is just a financial crutch for Ralph. He wants to make his father happy, and he knows that it will be years before he makes a living from his writing, anyway.”
“When is he going to get all this done?”
“You don’t know Ralph. Nothing will stop him.”
“Not even a family?”
Rita laughed. “No.”
I don’t think that Rita really knew what she was saying. I don’t think that she knew Ralph at all in those early days, before their marriage; she could hardly have guessed his extraordinary powers of concentration. But his attractiveness, coupled with the security that he could immediately offer, must have impelled her not only to accept him, but to make herself believe in his future greatness.
When I came to Buffalo for the first time after their marriage, I found that they were happy with each other. Rita invited me to dinner; her voice was breathless and warm, and I played through the afternoon rehearsal (I was with the Indianapolis Symphony that year) in a haze of romantic reminiscence.
Rita and Ralph had a flat in a huge old house on Humboldt Parkway. Almost every home along the pleasant street had a large front lawn with an elm tree shading the porch, and a large back yard, with an occasional stable in the rear. The houses looked as though people had been born in them in the days before women went to hospitals to give birth, as though people had grown old in them, died in them, and left the furnishings to their children. It wasn’t the kind of street that I would have envisioned for Rita and her golden harp—it struck me that I could have done almost as well for her myself.
“I’m so glad, Harry!” she cried when she answered the doorbell. “I was hoping though that you’d bring your fiddle. Maybe we could have tried one little duet.” She led me forward by the hand.
“Rehearsals in the afternoon, a concert in the evening …” I almost fell over the harp and the music stand in the living room.
“Care for a drink?” Rita was a little nervous. “Ralph will be home any minute.”
“Anything will do.”
She smiled shyly. “You can congratulate me—I’m going to have a baby.” She turned away and began to make a drink.
“I think that’s wonderful.”
“I want a houseful. Ralph is agreeable, as long as he can go on with his writing. That way we’ll both be able to—well, fulfill ourselves.”
I would have said something inappropriate in reply, but Ralph’s Ford pulled into the driveway at that moment.
Ralph had grown an aggressive bushy mustache which, together with his straw hat, made him look considerably older than I had remembered him. But as soon as he had removed his hat and accepted my congratulations on his impending fatherhood, he relaxed and grew extremely agreeable. Rita had told me that Ralph didn’t have much of an ear for music (about which he apologized deferentially but firmly, like a man asserting that he cannot abide olives, while protesting that he realizes he must be missing something special), but at the dinner table he asked me a number of questions about the relationships between guest artists and orchestra members.
He wanted to know, with a modest air that made me feel as though I were doing him a great favor, all sorts of technical details about the mechanics of touring orchestras.
“You know, Harry,” he said, bringing his jaws together on a stalk of celery with a loud snap, “it’s my theory that a man can compensate for a lack of imagination in a given field, say in music, by an extra expenditure of effort.”
“Do you mean that a fiddler can become a Heifetz simply because he’s willing to work harder than the average musician?”
Ralph laughed good-naturedly. “What I mean is that you can learn to do almost anything well if you organize your learning process and utilize every minute of the time you’ve dedicated to it.”
“You may be right.”
“Of course he’s right!” Rita turned to me vivaciously. “That’s how Ralph became a good engineer, even though he didn’t care for it.”
“Don’t mind us, Harry. We don’t usually waste time on abstract discussions like this.”
Rita and Ralph had tickets for the concert, so we left together in their car, and after the concert they came backstage for me. Rita turned pink when I introduced her to our conductor as a talented classmate; Ralph stood stolidly at her side, his eyes darting in every direction as if to make sure that he would miss nothing.
Later I teased him about it. “You looked like you were s
oaking up atmosphere.”
“The important thing is to observe, isn’t it, and to practice at being a writer even when you’re not writing? Besides,” he added with some hesitation, “I lead a pretty sedentary life. The music business is new to me.”
I was impressed and baffled. Rita, wedged between us in the narrow front seat of the car, was tired, but sat contentedly with her head on her husband’s shoulder and her hand in mine, unaware of how disturbed I was.
“It’s been a wonderful evening,” she murmured as we drew up to the house. “Didn’t you like it, Ralph;”
“It was a very fruitful experience.” In the dark I couldn’t tell whether he was being grim or merely funny.
But when we were sipping cold beer on the front porch and watching the Canadian flies slapping restlessly at the yellow lamp, I felt that Ralph was quite humble, and that it was Rita who was sustained by an unquestioning confidence in her husband’s secret genius. After a while she arose from the creaking glider and said, “I get worn out early these days.” She kissed us both. “Don’t talk too late. We all have to get up early.”
When she had gone inside Ralph said, “I suppose you envy me.”
“Why yes,” I replied, a little embarrassed, “I guess I do.”
He gestured at the house. “This is the life I’ve marked out for myself, but only because I can envision something different, something better, for Rita and me.”
I suspected that he was thinking primarily of another kind of life for himself, as he teetered back and forth in the rocker and stared moodily at me. And I was startled into a kind of wary wakefulness, because I had been wondering drowsily of the way Rita had cheated herself, or had been cheated by Ralph, somehow, out of the glamorous and exciting life that should have been hers. It appeared obvious to me that it was Ralph who had chosen this quiet humdrum routine, and who was better fitted for it.
I threw my cigarette onto the front lawn, and said rather coldly, “What kind of life do you think you’d like, Ralph?”
He laughed with sudden eagerness. “Oh, I can tell you that. I’d like to travel with Rita, to take her to the places she’d like to see—”
“But how about you?”
“Only because it would give me a chance to meet people, to talk to people. I don’t mind living in Buffalo. Any city is interesting, if you take the trouble to learn it. But I do resent having to spend precious time behind a desk checking blueprints that don’t mean a damn thing to me.”
“You must have known you wouldn’t like it, even before you started.”
“Of course I knew. I’ve never had any alternative. Even during high school and college I had to hustle every summer, driving a milk truck or working on a lake boat. And when I graduated—well, there was Rita …”
“But if you were writing in a garret you’d probably wish you were leading a normal life.”
“Oh, I could never be a starving artist. I think most of those guys are phonies, don’t you? Anyway, I have Rita. And it won’t be too long before I have my success.”
I wasn’t sure of what he meant by that, so I said vaguely, “I wish you all the luck in the world.”
“Thanks Harry.” He grasped my hand. “Too bad we can’t get together more often. Sometimes I feel cut off from the people I need—like a spy with nobody to report to.”
“Don’t you have friends here?”
“One or two. But I don’t belong, don’t have any connection with other writers—haven’t even got time to read their books!” He drained his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Let’s turn in, shall we?”
Rita and Ralph had more room than they needed at the time. I had accepted Rita’s eager invitation to sleep there rather than at the hotel; but I hadn’t foreseen that I would be bedded down in the nursery-to-be, next to their own room. I lay there quietly in the dark, hardly breathing, listening to Ralph removing his shoes (thunk, thunk) and hanging up his trousers (jingle, jingle) and clambering into bed with his wife (a squeak, several murmurs, and a grunt). And after that I wrapped the pillow about my ears. But still I slept very poorly that night.
So it was that, even before the sun came up, I was standing at the window that overlooked the back yard, staring down vacantly at the dewy lawn and at a pair of dungarees flapping mournfully from the clothesline, when I caught sight of Ralph.
He was walking across the damp grass with his trousers rolled up over the ankles, chomping hungrily on the buttered heel of a rye bread and carrying a couple of looselcaf notebooks in the crook of his arm. His shock of black hair stood up angrily, as if someone had used it as a handle to yank him out of bed. He moved purposefully across the yard until he had gained a small frame building adjoining the barn-garage. The rickety door closed behind him with a cool clatter, a light snapped on in the one window beyond the door, and then there was silence.
I shuffled over to the bed and lay down, exhausted. Eventually I fell asleep, thinking of Ralph working alone in the little building and of Rita beyond the wall, a few feet from me, curled into a ball like her unborn baby, her hair unbound on the pillow and her hands clasped warmly between her knees.
It was Rita who woke me. Ralph had already gone to work, but she was waiting to have her coffee with me, her eyes still swollen with sleep.
“I saw Ralph crossing the yard,” I said to her, “oh, it must have been hours ago.”
“He gets up every morning at four to write. We fixed up the toolhouse so he can work undisturbed.”
“I wouldn’t have the stamina for that routine.”
Rita nodded calmly. “He says sleep is a matter of habit. I only wish he had people to discuss his work with. It’s going to be a kind of history of Buffalo, you know, in story form.”
“A historical novel?”
“Ralph hates that expression! He’s doing a lot of research.”
“It’s fine that he knows what he wants to make of his life.”
“He’ll get out of the Water Department some day. We’ll both be free. I know we will!”
When I turned at the porch to shake Rita’s hand in farewell I felt a sudden ruefulness like a sharp physical pain in the pit of my stomach. Rita was young and fragile in her dressing gown, and it seemed to me that the outline of her pregnancy was just becoming visible. Her hand felt small and warm in mine. “The neighbors must be wondering who the tall dark stranger is.”
“I’d better leave now, before you’re ruined up and down Humboldt Parkway.”
Rita laughed out loud. As I stood on the porch in the pleasant morning sunlight, holding her hand, I realized (more than realized: I had known it all along) that I was not cut out to be a tall dark stranger, in her life or in any other girl’s. I had always known it, but nevertheless it was brutal, the way we stood there and joked about it. And then we said goodbye.
Six months later I received an announcement of the birth of a daughter to Ralph and Rita Everett. I must have gone to five or six stores before I found a silver fork and spoon set that seemed suitable. When I dropped the little package down the mail chute, I felt that a chapter of my life had been finished, and that while I was purged now of the anxious desire that had run its course like a long and serious illness, I would never again be really young. A few days later I got one of those little thank-you notes from Rita. It was enclosed with a copy of Harper’s that contained a poem by Ralph (about the burning of Buffalo in 1812, I think). “Ralph wants you to know,” Rita added, “that you’re the kind of reader he had in mind. He says it’s not so much, just one poem, but I feel as though it’s the beginning of a new life for us.”
Six or eight months later, Ralph sent me a reprint of a brief article that had been accepted by the American Historical Review, entitled (I still have it) “Some Neglected Aspects of the Early Rivalry Between Black Rock and Buffalo.” It wasn’t the kind of information that you’d go out of your way to learn, but I thought it had more verve than the usual scholarly monograph. And it was proof that Ralph was organizing
his time, as he would have said, digging away at the raw material for his book.
By the time I got to Buffalo again, Rita had had another baby, and Ralph’s father had come to live with them.
The first thing I noticed when Ralph opened the front door was that the harp was gone.
“You shouldn’t have taken a cab,” Ralph said. “I would have been only too glad to pick you up.”
I put my armful of presents on the couch. At the far end of the room, barricaded behind a baby’s play pen, Ralph’s father was seated in the easy chair, studying the want ad pages of the Buffalo Evening News. The oval peak of his bald head shone under the floor lamp and his high-top black shoes caught the light.
“Father, this is our friend Harry.”
The old man arose. “You went to school with Rita.”
“That’s right.” While we were shaking hands I could hear Rita cooing to an infant who suddenly burst into an angry wail. Ralph moved uneasily, but the old man stood still and erect, like a steel engraving out of an old American history book.
He was taller than his son, with a reddish closely shaven face on which time had worn two vertical grooves between his eyes and on either side of his thin mouth. His left arm was missing just above the elbow, and his empty shirt sleeve (he wore only an unbuttoned vest) was pinned neatly back. On his right arm he wore an elastic garter to shorten the sleeve. Despite his complexion and the almost combative cast of his features, there was an aura of death about him that affected me most unpleasantly. He looked as though he were relaxing after having served as a pallbearer at a friend’s funeral; and yet he gave the impression that his own end could not be far off. Perhaps the anger in his face, in his whole stringy body, even in his gnarled, veiny, and trembling hand, was that of a man who hated and cursed the idea of death.
Ralph said, “Would you like to see the kids before they go to sleep?”
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 19