NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  “Let me show you my layout.”

  His wooden filing cabinets were a marvel of precision. Ralph had cross-filed all of his material the way his engineering reports must have been indexed at his office, so that you could open any drawer and find references to the downtown scene in Buffalo of the 1850s, the clothing of the men, the manners of the women, the shape of the buildings.

  The novel itself was in a series of looseleaf notebooks, one chapter to a notebook, and they were stacked head-high on the roll-top desk. “I would have asked you to read it, as a favor to me,” Ralph said, “but every time I got a draft out it needed a little more work. After all these years, I’m almost through. I’m sure that if I hadn’t had to go downtown to work every day I could have gotten it out in a year or two of concentrated effort.”

  “Don’t you think you’re more mature now than when you started?”

  “I’m older, that’s all I know. Believe me, there’s something wrong about grubbing away so slowly in secret, like a hermit crab. I often think how much better it would have been if I had been able to publish regularly years ago, with each book maybe improving a little.”

  “Haven’t you enjoyed it?”

  Ralph rubbed his knuckles across his eyelids. “I suppose you’re happiest when you don’t have time to think about what you’re doing. But even if I don’t make a dime on my book, even if no one reads it but the critics, they’ll recognize that my very best is in it. That’s something to be able to say, isn’t it, that you’ve given everything that you have? And that you’ve done it without stimulation or encouragement, in the lonely hours of the night? … You go on, I’ll be in shortly.”

  As I turned on Ralph’s lawn to look back at him standing in the toolhouse doorway, caught by the waning rays of the late afternoon sun, I was filled with envy and admiration. Rita was wrong about him—of that I was sure.

  Only a few months (perhaps a year) later, I came home to the Bronx one evening from Philadelphia, put down my valise and fiddle in the foyer, and found my mother waiting up for me, lying on the sofa with a newspaper and a bowl of grapes. She had a way of popping the pulp into her mouth so that the skin remained between her fingers—it always made me nervous. She shoved aside the bowl, unable to divide her attention between me and the grapes, and said in a voice at once sad and accusing, “You said you’d be home early.”

  “I had to catch a later train. What’s new?”

  She sighed, hauling herself upright with a groan, to register her resentment against being treated as merely a messenger service.

  “What should be new? A boy (all of my friends were boys to my mother) called up this afternoon. He said his name was Ralph Edwards,” she added, as if she was perfectly aware that he had been lying.

  “But I don’t know any Ralph Edwards.”

  “From Rochester.”

  “From—Ralph Everett you mean, from Buffalo!”

  “So it was Everett. He said to tell you he was at a cocktail party. He sounded drunk.”

  “Where? In New York?” Gradually I pieced together from my mother’s grudging answers the information that Ralph’s book had been accepted by a publisher who had already begun an intensive promotional campaign with a cocktail party. I dialed the Algonquin, but the operator would not put me through to Ralph. Probably passed out cold, I thought, and asked for his wife; but she wasn’t registered.

  So he had come to New York alone for his first moment of triumph. It was a masculine enough action, and I knew that if the situation had been reversed Rita would surely have taken her husband and children along, like a lady ambassador. But I called the next morning and Ralph insisted that I meet him for lunch. He sounded frightened.

  I had to join him in an out-of-the-way spot on Eighth Avenue, and although I was early, Ralph was already waiting when I arrived. “Hell of a thing,” he said. “I had to sneak off, or they would have dragged me to lunch too.”

  “Are you that popular?”

  “I need advice,” he replied obliquely. “Never realized what I was getting into. Look here.” He opened a heavy old-fashioned briefcase and pulled out a bundle of papers. “They’ve promised me lecture tours—personal appearances in bookstores—radio quiz programs—interviews with columnists I never heard of—”

  “That sounds wonderful!”

  “There’s a catch to it.”

  “There always is. But it looks like your book is going to be a big thing!”

  Ralph looked up, surprised. “Of course. But I didn’t figure on a bunch of editors, agents, press agents, book club representatives, and I don’t know what the hell the rest of them are, all nagging me to jazz up the manuscript.”

  “I don’t understand, Ralph.”

  “Probably I’m naïve. I didn’t expect to be told I’d written a great book, and then have a bunch of plumbers go to work on it, not paying any more attention to me than if I had been just a yokel, sightseeing in the publisher’s office.”

  “Apparently they want to make sure it will sell.”

  “But what are they going to make out of me? Yesterday they threw graphs at me to prove they know what makes a book sell. I said, Won’t it sell if it’s good? And then they gave me reader involvement.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They’ve got figures that show how long people read a book before putting it down. Somebody has even found out what catches people’s eyes when they’re browsing in bookstores. And my book hasn’t got it. My editor says—” Ralph’s voice was scornful, and yet uncertain, and he spoke without looking at me, “—I’ve got to make it longer.”

  “Longer?”

  “I’ve been thinking about telling them to go to hell. But they’re nice people, Harry. They can’t understand why I’m not more cooperative, when all that they’re interested in is me and my career and seeing that I reach the big public I’m entitled to. All I can say in answer is Yes, but what about the book? It’s shaken down now to where they’ve turned the job over to a girl named Doris. A Wellesley girl, out of Butte, Montana… I need your advice.”

  “If I can only help—”

  “They want to send Doris back to Buffalo with me to advise me on a new draft. Doris has the proposed changes lined up in a card index. She’s very efficient—used to work for Gallup. Should I go through with it? I’ve been up all night trying to make up my mind.”

  “What does Rita say?”

  “She thinks it’s the chance of a lifetime.”

  “It is your first book,” I said. “And it isn’t as if you didn’t want it to be popular. I remember in San Francisco you were trying to find out what the average man wants to read.”

  “Sure, but I’ve already gone as far as I can, maybe even too far, in that direction. Will it still be my book when that Wellesley girl gets through with it?”

  “She can’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”

  “Somehow I didn’t think you’d agree with Rita about this.” Ralph began to stuff the papers back into his briefcase. “But I know what you mean. I suppose I have the obligation to listen. I can always say No.”

  Ralph flew back to Buffalo, and the Wellesley girl went with him. I still have a letter from Rita that describes, with a mixture of fear and mounting excitement, how Doris with her statistics on reader involvement was succeeding in persuading Ralph, despite himself, to broaden his story, work in material that he had previously scrapped, simplify his prose, and inject additional romance. It was on the last point, though, that Ralph balked. Doris explained very carefully, as I gathered, that the firm had had the manuscript mimeographed and pre-tested: there had been strong indications that the reading public would be happier if an aged Iroquois squaw were made out to be eighteen, in order that she might be involved in a romance.

  Although he had been going along with Doris’s judgment, something about this suggestion made Ralph become really stubborn: he informed his publishers that he was calling the whole thing off. Doris turned to Rita for help, and it was at this point
that Rita used a weapon which she had never, in all the years of their marriage, turned on her husband. “It hurt me to do it,” she wrote me, “in fact it went against the grain, but I felt that in this instance it was for his own good. I told him that I hadn’t skimped and sacrificed all these years just so that he could throw everything away in one quixotic gesture. Of course when I said this I was thinking of Ralph, and of what was best for him, but he took it to mean that I was hurt about the past and frightened about the future—and as a result he has promised at least to think it over.”

  Ralph’s resistance was weakened, but not completely destroyed, by Rita’s declaration that if it continued it could only make their years together seem a terrible, useless waste. He wanted, she told me, some assurance from a disinterested person, an artist. “He doesn’t know anybody. Whom can he turn to, Ed Herlands? It has to be you, Harry. Please call him on the phone and talk to him.”

  I was very reluctant. I didn’t know anything about fiction, or about the merits of the proposal that had so disturbed Ralph. Nevertheless I did feel that I had a responsibility, as a family friend, if nothing more. So I called Ralph. I didn’t attempt to pressure him. I simply asked: “What will you gain if you persist? Will you change the manuscript back to what it was?”

  “Maybe part-way.”

  “Supposing you start all over with another publisher, assuming you can get out of your contract. What makes you so sure you wouldn’t run into the same thing again? What makes you sure that your way is the right way, or the only way? You’ve never published a book before, and these people have been doing it all their lives.”

  “So if you were me, you’d give in.”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m just asking you what the alternatives are, and whether you’ve thought them all through.”

  Ralph didn’t say much to that; I think Rita was at his side while he talked. He thanked me most warmly for having phoned, and within a day or two he was back at work on the manuscript. Very shortly thereafter the job was done.

  Doris was right, of course. No matter how reasonable Ralph’s objections may have seemed to him, the immediate astonishing success of the book was proof that the Wellesley girl (as he persisted in calling her) knew her business.

  It seems to me now that before I was actually aware of what was happening, “Queen City” became a national catch phrase. The papers were full of it, I listened to the speculation in Pullman washrooms, backstage at concerts, in restaurants, everywhere, about which Hollywood stars would play the leading roles in the movie version of Ralph’s book, and for a while you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing a pun on the book’s title or on Ralph’s name, to the accompaniment of roars and applause.

  In a matter of months Ralph and his book achieved the status of an institution, and I grew used to the feature articles on Ralph’s long ordeal and the photographs of Ralph—smiling rather grimly, it seemed to me—seated with Rita and their four famous daughters in the living room, as though he had just been elected Governor. From time to time I thought that I should salute in some practical way my friends’ great good fortune, but all I could think of was something ridiculously inappropriate like sending a basket of fruit or a box of flowers. So I did nothing.

  The excitement about the book was at its peak when Rita wrote extending me a feverish invitation to spend at least part of my vacation with them at their new summer place in Canada. She made it sound as if I would be doing a great favor by coming up and helping them to enjoy their success. I was flattered and I accepted.

  In the club car I picked up a copy of Life; it seemed inevitable that there should be a story about Ralph and his novel. The article itself was full of statistics on the number of hours Ralph had spent in the toolhouse, the number of pounds that his manuscript weighed, and the marks that his public school teachers remembered giving him, but there was an omission which struck me with special force: while Ralph’s mother, who had died during his teens, was adequately and conventionally described, there was absolutely no mention of his father. And in addition to this there was one sentence that leaped up at me and that I immediately committed to memory, like a musical phrase that would have to recur in my life: “While the final verdict on Ralph Everett’s work is not yet in, it must be obvious to the author by now that sophisticates will ignore any work which celebrates the American dream in a manner acceptable to the general public. But their disdain will surely be counterbalanced by the shower of gold now raining down on Ralph Everett as a reward for his long years of solitary labor.”

  I was intercepted at the station by Penny, who ran into my arms breathless and excited.

  “Mom couldn’t find a place to park and she’s driving back and forth, back and forth!”

  We found Rita cruising slowly down the street in a handsome green convertible. I tossed my bag in the back.

  “The car goes well with your hair, Rita.”

  “I hope you won’t tease me about all our new belongings. Prosperity has brought more problems than we ever had before.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m terribly worried about Ralph. He’s working like a dog fixing the summer place—” she waved up ahead, along the river road on which we were driving, “—and yet he can’t sleep nights. He wanders around all night, and the whole routine starts again in the morning.”

  “Perhaps he can’t break his old habits.”

  “It’s more than that. He says the money is a trap for us, and that we’ll wind up living like rich people. For a while he talked about our being too provincial, and what Europe could do for us, and how we could sink our roots when we came back, oh I don’t know, in South Dakota or some such place. Imagine sinking roots in the Black Hills with four daughters!”

  “But now?”

  “He’s like a man who suspects he has cancer and sits in the doctor’s office laughing and joking, and waiting to hear the worst. Ralph has been waiting and waiting for the verdict of the important critics. The more the book sells, the worse their silence is.” Rita indicated a pile of magazines that lay between us on the leather seat. “These are mostly quarterlies, college magazines and such. Some of them I never heard of. I’m afraid to look and see if there’s anything about the book in them. It sounds crazy but sometimes he acts as though he was ashamed that the book is so successful.”

  We had turned off the highway and were driving down a narrow sandy road, at the end of which stood a rambling bungalow, half concealed by scrub pines and oaks. As we neared the house I could see Lake Erie glimmering through the trees, perhaps an eighth of a mile away. Daisy, swinging slowly and seriously on an old tire hanging from a tree on the front lawn, raised her arm gravely in a formal greeting. Behind her I could hear Robin and Laura playing jacks on the screened porch.

  As we drove to the back of the house I caught sight of Ralph, stripped to the waist and straightening up stiffly from a barbecue pit which he had been plastering. He too waved to us, trowel in hand, and came slowly to the car, sweating heavily and scowling into the sunlight.

  I hauled out my bag. “You look twice as tired as when you used to work for an honest living, Ralph.”

  “I am! But they tell me I’m living the way a successful writer should. Quit my job, you know—I’m an ex-engineer.” Suddenly he caught sight of the magazines. His nostrils dilated above the tough mustache and I could see his fine rib cage expand as he wiped his sweaty palms on his dungarees. “Excuse me,” he said politely. He reached over and plucked up the magazines from the car seat, then riffled them quickly.

  “I’ve struck gold,” he exclaimed. “Not just a review, a whole article. The Problem of the American Writer: Ralph Everett, A Case in Point.”

  “Couldn’t it wait till after supper? I’m sure that Harry—”

  “I bet Harry wants to know what this twenty-one-year-old prodigy from Savannah thinks of old Ralph’s first book. All Harry’s seen is praise from the hacks so far.” There was something menacing in his tone. We stood there h
elplessly in the driveway while Ralph flipped the pages of the journal. “A Case in Point—did you ever think of me in that way, Rita?” Ralph began to walk toward the porch, reading as he moved; Rita and I followed him like two nervous retainers, uncertain whether to follow the master into the bath. But in an instant Ralph turned on us savagely.

  “This kid knows more than the old men. ‘What can one do but weep,’ he says, ‘when one examines the career of Ralph Everett? Here is a man, as we are told, who gave his all for his art. He made the accepted sacrifices, cut himself off from fun and frolic, practiced his craft in silence in a drafty toolhouse in the worst hours of the early morning, did not compromise by publishing prematurely, and … made a tidy fortune with a book which can only be called a production.’ ”

  Ralph looked up from the magazine, his face expressionless. “The boy resents my money. That’s the only false note so far. Doesn’t he know that it’s fashionable for writers to be well off these days?”

  “Let’s drop it for now, Ralph.”

  “‘Queen City,’” he read on, ignoring us, “‘can be viewed in two ways, either as the labored effort of a serious but essentially untalented man, or as a striking example of the effect of the corruption of American culture on its worst victim, the creative man.’”

  Rita stared very hard at the keys that she still clasped in her fingers, her brows contracted as though they had suddenly become a mysterious object. Finally she said, “I just don’t see why you should be so affected by a youngster, a mere boy, when you’ve been praised by—”

  “Because writing means more to this kid than it does to those old fakers who make a living by patting people like me on the back. I know he gets a childish kick out of sniping at success, but he believes what he’s saying. ‘The very smell of big money,’ he says, ‘is on every page of Mr. Everett’s novel, and while it would be unfair to conclude from the text that his years of selfless labor were spent with one eye on the eventual reproduction of his story in more popular media, his triumphant reliance on stock situations for characters on whose details of speech and dress he has obviously lavished untiring research would point to the fact that Ralph Everett is a captive, bound not hand and foot, but body and soul, to the culture from which he thought to liberate himself by an intense but hopelessly insecure act of will.’ That’s what the people I’ve been waiting for would have said, if they had felt like taking the trouble.” Ralph tossed the magazine on a porch chair. “I want a copy of this sent to the Wellesley girl.”