NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  When I pushed my way into the Biltmore lobby through the swirling Saturday crowds, I was struck speechless at the sight of Teddy, already waiting for me. Not only was she unaware that she had breached the code by arriving early, but she did not even seem to notice how she was being sized up by a group of nudging sailors. She was nervous, yes, but only—I could tell—because she was looking for me. The tip of her blunt little nose was pinker than her cheeks, and she dabbed at it with a handkerchief that she took from the pocket of her fur-trimmed plaid coat as she squinted this way and that, searching for me. I realized for the first time that she was nearsighted.

  I hung back for just a moment, then stepped forward and called out her name.

  With a glad cry she hastened toward me. “I was afraid I might have missed you in all this crowd.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t show up at all.”

  “Silly.” This was a word Teddy used often. But she was pleased, and as she pressed my arm I could smell her perfume, light and girlish. “What are we going to do?”

  I wanted to show her off. Outside, I led her over to Fifth Avenue, then north, and we paused now and then in the faltering late-October sunlight to look in the shop windows. With Teddy at my side I felt once again a part of the life of the city, secure for the moment at least, as I had not felt wandering forlornly with my false liberty, or hanging, miserable, around the battered ping-pong tables of the USO, waiting for nothing.

  At 53rd Street we headed west and stopped at the Museum of Modern Art. The bulletin board announced an old Garbo movie. I turned to Teddy.

  “We’re just in time for the three-o’clock showing.”

  “Don’t you have to be a member or something?” Teddy looked at me uneasily.

  I was still learning how provincial some of these New York girls could be. I led Teddy through the revolving glass doors and took unhesitating advantage of my uniform to get us two tickets; skirting the crowd waiting for the elevator, we skipped down the stairs to the auditorium.

  The movie was The Story of Gösta Berling. I remember very little about it other than the astonishingly plump whiteness of the youthful Garbo’s arms, for I was burningly aware of Teddy’s forearm alongside mine. After a while I took her hand and held it through the picture. As our body warmth flowed back and forth, coursing between us like some underground hot spring, I peered covertly at her. She was staring intently—too intently—at the screen; and I knew, as I knew the thud of my own pulse in my ears, that I would never be content with simply sitting at her side. I would have to possess her. Somewhere near the end of the movie, reasonably certain that no one would be observing us, I raised her hand to my mouth, palm up, and pressed it full against my lips. At that she turned her head and gazed at me tremulously.

  “You mustn’t,” she whispered.

  She meant the contrary, I was positive. Giddily, I allowed her to retrieve her hand, and when the picture ended I slipped her coat over her shoulders and led her up the stairs to the main gallery.

  “I’ll show you my favorite picture here,” I said. We stood before the big canvas that used to be everybody’s favorite in those old days before everybody went totally abstract. It was by Tchelitchew, it was called Hide and Seek, and it’s too bad it didn’t get burned up in the fire they had not long ago. It consisted mostly of an enormous, thickly foliated tree, like an old oak, aswarm with embryolike little figures, some partly hidden, some revealed, some forming part of the tree itself.

  Teddy appraised it carefully. Finally she said, “You know what it reminds me of? Those contests I used to enter. Find seven mystery faces hidden in the drawing and win a Pierce bicycle.”

  I was nettled. “Did you win?”

  “Sure. But instead of giving me the girl’s twenty-six-inch bike, they’d send me huge boxes of Christmas cards to sell.”

  By the time Teddy and I were walking south on Lexington, with the wind comfortably at our backs, we had exchanged considerable information about our childhoods, none of hers important enough for me to recall now except that her father had dropped dead in the street during his lunch hour, in the garment center, two years earlier.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, clinging to my arm.

  “I thought we’d eat in an Armenian restaurant. Unless you don’t care for Armenian food.”

  “I never tasted it. Not that I know of.”

  No other girl that I knew would have admitted it. Not in that way. We hastened to 28th Street, to a basement restaurant with candlelit tables and a motherly proprietress.

  I thought I was doing not badly at all. Over the steaming glasses of tea and the nutty baklava Teddy’s eyes glowed, and she held my hand tightly on the crumpled linen cloth. Her face was still unformed, but I observed, for the first time, that her cheekbones slanted, almost sharply, beneath the soft freshness of her delicate skin, and in the shadow cast by the uncertain candle there was a suggestion of a cleft in her chin. I couldn’t wait to be alone with her, and I judged that the time had come for me to tell her about my friends in the Village who sometimes loaned me their little apartment for my weekend liberties, as they had this weekend.

  “Phil is in four-F with a hernia, but he’s nervous about being reclassified, so he’s been trying to line up a Navy commission in Washington. Charlene—that’s his wife—just found out she can’t have children. She’s planning to start her own nursery school in Washington if Phil gets into Navy Intelligence.”

  “If they’re your friends,” Teddy said gravely, “they must be nice.”

  I winced for her. Now I know a little better; don’t we all flatter ourselves by thinking that way of our friends, when all too often it is simply not true? Phil was not nice; he was a climber. His ambition, combined with his terror of death, drove him to get that commission.

  But to Teddy I explained, earnestly and wholeheartedly, “Phil is an anthropologist, and Charlene paints. They’ve been to Mexico, and their place is full of things like beaten silver masks and temple fragments.”

  “It sounds lovely.”

  “Let’s go. It’s not far—just down on Jane Street.”

  Teddy was not quick, but she was not stupid either. “Will there be anyone there?”

  I knew at once that I had moved too fast. And lying could only make things worse. “They probably won’t be back from Washington before tomorrow.”

  “In that case I think I’d better not.” Teddy flushed, and forced herself to look at me. “You’re not angry, are you?”

  “I wasn’t planning on assaulting you,” I said, trying hard not to sound sullen. “I mean, the place isn’t an opium den.”

  “I know. It’s just that I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

  When we were out on the street once again, walking west into a fall rain as fine as spray from an atomizer, Teddy stopped suddenly before a darkened courtyard and looked up at me anxiously.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I guess I’m just not very sophisticated about those things.”

  Pressing her against the wrought-iron picket fence before which she stood, her head tilted, trying to catch some light in my eyes or across my face which would tell her what I was feeling, I folded her in my arms and kissed her for the first time.

  I kissed her again, and a third time, and maybe I wouldn’t have been able to stop, but Teddy passed her hand across her forehead to brush back her damp hair and said, laughing somewhat shakily, “Don’t you know that it’s raining?”

  So we went on to the Village Vanguard, and then to Romany Marie’s, where Teddy assured me, after she had had her fortune told, that this had been the loveliest evening she had ever spent. Like a dream, she said—the whole day had been like a dream.

  At about two o’clock in the morning I offered to see her home. She insisted, as we stood arguing by the mountain of Sunday papers at the Sheridan Square newsstand, that she wouldn’t think of my riding the subway all the way up to the East Bronx for an hour and then all the way back for another hour.
Not when I had to get up almost every morning at five-thirty, do calisthenics, and practice lowering lifeboats into the icy waters of Sheepshead Bay. I yielded, but not before I had gotten her promise that we would meet that afternoon at the Central Park Zoo, where she had to take her younger brother. I stood at the head of the subway stairs and watched, bemused, as she tripped down them, as lightly and swiftly as if she were still a child, hurrying so as not to be late for school.

  At the zoo I found Teddy as easily as if we had been alone in that vast rectangle of rock and grass, instead of being surrounded as we were by thousands of Sunday strollers. She was standing in front of the monkey cages with her younger brother, Stevie, a solemn-looking mouth-breather with glasses and the big behind that many boys acquire during the final years of childhood. She whirled about at my touch, her face already alight with pleasure.

  “Did you sleep well, Teddy?”

  “Like a baby. Such sweet dreams!” And she introduced me to her brother.

  What he wanted was to attend a war-bond rally at Columbus Circle, where they were going to display a Jap Zero and a movie star. I think the star was Victor Mature; in any case, on the way to see him and the captured airplane I pulled Teddy aside and asked her if we couldn’t cut out for a couple of hours and run down to Phil’s apartment.

  She stared at me. “Honestly, I think you have a one-track mind.”

  “Phil and Charlene are in from Washington,” I explained hastily. “They’d like to meet you.”

  “But I’m hardly even dressed to meet you!” In dismay she pointed to her loafers, her sweater and skirt, her trench coat, but I succeeded in persuading her.

  While we stood in line to see the airplane, Teddy asked Stevie if he’d mind if we left him alone for a while. He barely heard her. He promised to wait for her through the Army Band concert, and we hurried off to the downtown bus. All the way to the Village Teddy kept me busy reassuring her that we wouldn’t be barging in where we weren’t wanted.

  Phil’s place was strewn not only with the various sections of the Sunday Times but with a crowd of weary weekend loungers who hadn’t been there when I left that morning: an unmilitary Army officer and his hung-over girl friend, a dancer in blue jeans from the apartment across the hall who was studying the want ads while she picked at her bare toes, a nursery-school-teacher friend of Charlene’s who was arguing heatedly with her in the kitchen about child development. The radio on the bookcase was blasting away with the New York Philharmonic.

  Teddy sat primly on a corner of the studio couch with her knees pressed together and a paper napkin spread over them, sipping coffee and nibbling on a Triscuit and speaking only when spoken to. Phil got me off in the john at one point and said, grinning and shaking his head and winking in his nervous way, “You’ll never make that girl.”

  I was annoyed, but I wasn’t exactly sure why. “What makes you say that?”

  “Aside from the fact that she’s a virgin and terrified of you and your highbrow friends, she’s too clean. I’ll swear she uses those soaps they advertise in The American Girl.”

  “How would you know about The American Girl?”

  “I’ve got a little sister.”

  I thought of the contests that Teddy used to enter—Find 7 Hidden Faces—and I found myself hurrying back to her side with her trench coat.

  “Yes, let’s go,” she said. “I’m getting worried about Stevie. If my mother knew, she’d kill me.”

  “I wouldn’t let her do that,” I replied manfully.

  “I’d like to see you stop her,” Teddy said to me over her shoulder on our way out. “You don’t know my mother.”

  I didn’t know quite how to answer that, so I busied myself with finding a cab—no mean trick in those days, when they weren’t allowed to cruise. I didn’t want to know her mother, but on the other hand I wasn’t about to come out and say so. When we were settled in the taxi that I had gone several blocks to find, Teddy said mournfully, “Your friends are very talented people.”

  That made me a little suspicious. “Most of them aren’t my friends. And besides, who’s talented?”

  “Well, take that Army lieutenant. He’s an artist. He told me so.”

  “Rollini? He paints camouflage on the sides of airplane hangars. I don’t see that that’s such a big deal.”

  “You know what I mean. I just don’t think I fit in with those people. I can’t do anything special.” She gestured helplessly. “Look at me.”

  The cab swung sharply onto Sixth Avenue, and Teddy was flung into my arms. I kissed her while her mouth was still open to say something else.

  “Wait,” she panted, breaking free. “I want to ask you something.” She huddled up, very small, out of my reach in a corner of the cab. “Do you really like me?”

  “Like you?” I asked. “My God, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve every known. All week in those cruddy barracks I keep telling myself—”

  She interrupted my protestations. “That’s not what I mean. I wasn’t fishing for compliments. I didn’t ask you if you thought I was pretty, I asked you how much you liked me.”

  Teddy knew as well as I how hard that would be for me to answer. Maybe that was why she didn’t stop me when I reached out for her once again, wanting to substitute caresses for words. Only when we were within a few blocks of Columbus Circle did she part from me again, her forehead wrinkled and her lower lip trembling just the slightest bit.

  “I just don’t understand,” she said wonderingly and not very happily. “It’s all wrong.”

  What was I going to tell her—that I wanted to make love to her? She knew that already. Before I could say anything we were caught up and blocked in the traffic of the bond rally that was on the point of breaking up. Teddy darted out of the cab door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll write you!” as she dashed off in search of Stevie. While I stood there in the eddying crowd, paying the driver, the band broker into “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” and I saw Stevie the mouth-breather, standing with his jaw agape and staring at the trombones through his eyeglasses.

  Before the week was over I had my letter from Teddy. I am not going to try to reproduce it here. I will only say that it can best be described as a love letter and that it was so gauche, so overwritten, so excruciatingly true (“I am simply not used to going out with boys like you”) and at the same time so transparently false (“my brother Stevie thinks the world of you”) that it was immediately, painfully, terribly clear to me that I would never be able to answer in kind, and that there was no sense in my deluding myself into believing that I would. I hope it does not make me sound completely impossible if I add that her words not only released me from thinking seriously about her; they also made it all but impossible for me to think of anything but conquering her.

  What inflamed me all the more was that shortly after I found Teddy’s provocative letter on my bunk, my entire platoon was restricted to the base for the weekend. Trapped in that raw, artificial place, in its womanless wooden huts thrown up hastily to house some thousands of frightened boys being converted into sailors of a sort, I spent my mornings bobbing on a whaleboat in the bay, rowing in ragged unison with my freezing mates, and my afternoons ostensibly learning knots and braiding lines but actually lost in an erotic reverie of Teddy—of her slim arms, her tumbling hair, her pulsing lips—gone all wanton and yielding.

  By the time we finally met again, I had memorized every line of her, from her slanting cheekbones to her small feet that toed out the least bit—and I could hardly remember what she looked like. We were constrained then, two weeks after the bond rally, not only by what had passed between us but by the heedless souls shoving us away from each other in the 42nd Street entrance to the Times Square subway station. It was the worst possible place for a boy and a girl to meet on a Saturday afternoon, in that blowing surf of old newspapers and candy wrappers, with the hot, rancid smell of nut stands assailing us. We hardly knew what to say to each other.

  She smiled a
t me nervously, and I was emboldened to take her by the hand. “Let’s get out of here.” Willingly she mounted the stairs with me to the street, but when we came out onto the sidewalk the raw rain had turned to sleet; it cut at our faces like knives. I cursed the world, the war, the weather.

  “But if you were stationed at that Merchant Marine camp in St. Petersburg,” Teddy pointed out, “we would never have met.”

  “Oh great,” I said. “Now you’re going to do the Pollyanna routine.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Teddy replied humbly.

  “I want to kiss you, that’s all. Are we supposed to stand out here in public and freeze to death while I make love to you? Come on, Teddy, let’s go down to my friends’ apartment. Like civilized people, like folks. What do you say?”

  She could tell I wasn’t going to push it too hard, so she laughed and tucked her arm in mine. “Come on, Mr. One-Track Mind, let’s get out of the sleet.”

  It was driving down hard, and we had to run into a doorway, which turned out to be the entrance to a second-floor chess-and-checkers parlor. When Teddy laughed, still gasping a little and shaking off wetness like a puppy, and said, “I wonder what it’s like up there,” I took her by the arm and led her up the stairs. It never ceased to amaze me how a New York girl could know so little.

  Teddy hadn’t played much chess, only with her brother (their father had taught them), so I showed her a few openings, but she was frankly more interested in sizing up the habitués.

  Later, while we were having a drink at an Eighth Avenue hotel bar (I teased Teddy into having a Pink Lady instead of her usual ginger ale), I asked her if she’d ever eaten a real Chinese dinner. She looked a little disappointed. “We have Chinks in the Bronx almost every Saturday. Sometimes we even take it home with us.”

  “I’m not talking about chop suey, Teddy. I’m talking about the greatest cooking this side of Paris.”

  As if I’d ever eaten in Paris, much less in Peking! But that made no difference. I knew a real restaurant down on Doyers Street, and when we got there the headwaiter even remembered me. Or at least he claimed to, which was just as good; and when he followed the bird’s-nest soup with platters of crisp glazed duck, Teddy gazed at me in awe.